


want you to want me

by chickenshithypocrite



Category: Rent - Larson
Genre: Anal Fingering, Anxiety, Aphrodisiacs, Begging, Casual Sex, Collars, Dirty Talk, Exhibitionism Kink, Explicit Sexual Content, Friends to Lovers, Kinktober, Kinktober 2017, M/M, Masturbation, Oral Sex, Recreational Drug Use, Sexual Experimentation, Spanking, humiliation play
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-30
Updated: 2018-01-25
Packaged: 2019-01-07 08:41:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 46,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12229452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chickenshithypocrite/pseuds/chickenshithypocrite
Summary: In which Mark is very flustered, Roger is possessive, they both have a lot of capital f Feelings, and it all works out in the end (guaranteed.) In the meantime, though... kinky sex! So much of it! What are best friends for, right?





	1. the catalyst

**Author's Note:**

> Welp. This is my contribution to Kinktober... I've been wanting to jump back into writing gratuitous smut between these two for a while, and this seemed like an excellent opportunity. Anyway, this was meant to be mostly porn, but the plot snuck up on me. Stay tuned for a new chapter every day of the month! (Tags will be added accordingly.)  
> Edit: Currently under revision! Will hopefully be updated regularly again once that's done.

There is a dog collar lying on the floor beside the couch.

Mark blinks down at it, thoroughly confused and even more unwilling to ask for an explanation. Not that anyone else is awake enough to give him one – or sober enough, judging by the startled, blurry little giggles bubbling intermittently from Maureen’s lips.

There are also several empty packages of Pop Rocks, a half-dried beer spill, more pairs of underwear than make any amount of logical sense, and what he _thinks_ is a grape-flavored condom stretched over an underripe banana. Collins sometimes found a hidden enthusiasm for sex ed at the bottom of the bottle, and they’d seen the bottom of several last night. Mark moves to pick that up as well, and then abruptly stops and turns around, unable to justify touching something that more than likely had ended up at least partially inside one of his best friends last night.

So really, Mark reasons as he picks the collar off the floor and stuffs it into his back pocket, this thing is harmless. The fact that none of them own a dog is hardly even worth mentioning.

It probably belongs to Maureen but she’s going to be drunk for half the day yet, after the number of shots she and Joanne had taken together toward the end of the evening. Mark isn’t just going to leave something like this lying around. The sight of it is making his stomach twist.

It’s… it’s inappropriate.

That’s his justification for the moment, anyway.

The loft is looking semi-livable again when the others really start to rouse. Mark dangles a mug of coffee in Roger’s face and dances smugly out of range when he takes a swipe at him. Everyone is a little hungover, himself included, which is how he excuses himself later when he realizes that he’d never given Maureen her collar back.

 _She didn’t ask about it, anyway_ , he tells himself stubbornly. Maybe it’s not hers after all.

* * *

 

Technically, Mark has been fantasizing about sucking Roger’s dick for about six months.

In reality it’s probably a lot longer than that – like, years, maybe two, or possibly… all of them, but that’s entirely too embarrassing for him to admit even in his own head – but he stubbornly insists, every time he lies in bed unable to sleep and slowly palming the line of his erection through his boxers, that it _really_ isn’t anything serious.

It’s not like Roger is the _only_ person he finds attractive. He exhales shakily as he draws his fist back up tightly around his shaft, working his thumb along the underside of his leaking head. It twitches with interest and he bites down hard on his lip, screwing his eyes shut, the made-up image of Roger leaning down over him and knocking his hand away to replace it with his own bright and tantalizing behind his closed lids. He can imagine the way those callouses would feel ghosting over his thighs, curiously following the length of him and circling the aching, swollen tip. His own fingers clumsily try to follow along.

Mark has lots of other, Roger-free fantasies too. They’re just… not as interesting to him, right now. Roger is fresh from his post-breakup angst and gorgeous and brooding and _single_ , and Mark can't stop looking at him out of the corners of his eyes every chance he gets.

The novelty of this just hasn’t worn off yet. Right. Right?

It had started entirely innocently, of course. Mark was nineteen when he first landed himself here, and incredibly, stupidly, godawful horny in the way that only mostly-virginal college-aged boys can manage. Understandably horny, really. Roger, in contrast, was twenty one and getting laid on average every four or five hours (and only three quarters of those lays were with his actual girlfriend, if he was feeling particularly faithful that day).

He wasn't just getting laid quietly and discreetly like a _normal_ person living with five of his closest friends, though. Roger never seemed to have boring regular-person missionary sex. Roger had wild, passionate, probably extremely unsafe sex with whoever he happened to be near when the mood struck him. Which meant… Crystal (the girl he’d apparently been “dating” when Mark first moved in), April (the girl he’d been in the middle of screwing when Mark first moved in, literally), or one of the sweet-faced girls who worked at the music shop that he got his guitar strings at.

 _What_ was _that girl’s name?_

Mark can’t focus for shit. All he can think about is a jumbled collage of all the girls he can remember walking in on Roger fondling, the collar on the floor, the thrilling-painful press of Roger's thumbs on the insides of his wrists while they were wrestling for the remote, Roger’s long fingers, Roger’s thumb ring brushing cool against his neck while Roger clicked the buckle shut at his throat just as he swallowed -

Fuck, _fuck,_ wait _,_ too much, he’s -

Mark forces himself to open his eyes for just a moment and stare at the ceiling, feeling his pulse throb in the crease of his wrists, feeling his cock throb hotly in the damp-but-not-quite-enough curve of his palm.

Well- the _point_ is, Roger was always having enthusiastic, kinky marathon sex when they were younger. Loudly. Sometimes in the living room, in the middle of the day. He _clearly_ wasn’t concerned about his privacy. (That April had been almost entirely without boundaries _or_ tact hadn't helped matters at all.) In fact, Collins had spent four years affectionately calling Roger his Public Penetration Protége… which had earned them equally as many concerned looks as dirty ones, usually from waitstaff and middle-aged white women in grocery stores.

 _So_ , Mark had concluded way back then, he really couldn’t be blamed for using the ambiance to his advantage.

There’s none now, though, just the distant sound of the shower running as Roger tries to wash away his hangover - which has never worked, as far as Mark knows, but it _is_ an opportunity he can't pass up.

After all, he can't walk around for days half-hard and licking his lips every time Roger touches him casually, or looks at him, or every time he thinks of Roger fixing that collar around his neck and yanking on it to pull him into a rough, wet, open-mouthed kiss.

 _Yeah, right_ , his rational mind laughs at him. _In your dreams._

 _Shut up and let me have this!_ his subconscious whines.

Roger is only going to be in the shower for twenty minutes tops, though, so Mark doesn’t have time to have a crisis. He’s got to finish chasing this orgasm or die of embarrassment. Got to get this out of his system. Right?

He tips his head back and lets a deep shudder crawl down along his spine to pool in his groin, fingers tightening just beneath the head and squeezing out a bead of slick precome out to drip down and make a mess of his hand. Roger would do the same thing- he’d tease, he was always such a fucking tease, and those rough, nimble fingers would rasp over Mark’s sensitive shaft almost lovingly, consideringly… He’d lean down and remind Mark huskily, _“You’re mine, yeah? No one else is allowed to touch you now. I decide when you come… if you're allowed to.”_ And he’d give Mark that slow, wicked smirk that he always used to give the girls in the front of the crowd, mussed hair and smudged eyeliner, all sexed-up and easy like there’s nowhere else in the world he’d rather be but right there crowding Mark into the mattress, bringing him off with his teeth grazing his neck beneath the collar and his palm so big and warm and damp where it’s curling around his cock finally, _finally_ giving Mark a real pull-

Mark dimly hears the strangled noise that leaves his throat when his hips jerk up, come spurting between his fingers with forceful enthusiasm, but he can't bring himself to care. He can be self-conscious about it later. Right now, the vivid image of Roger leaning back to watch him come is still imprinted on the backs of his eyelids, and the only thing he can think about is the sweat-damp of the sheets his feet have been scrabbling on, the slight shape of the collar in his pocket pressed into his thigh, and his own heaving chest and trembling, sticky fingers.

_Fuck._

Panting, Mark stares at the ceiling and has the belated realization that April’s ecstatic, breathy moans had stopped appearing in his fantasies a long time ago. The memory still gets him a little warm under the collar whenever he digs it up, but that's all it is. A memory.

Roger is a _lot_ more than a measly memory of orgasms of years gone by.

Roger is one of the only reasons Mark dragged himself out of bed every single day, despite all his aches and pains and disappointments.

Also, Roger is just... incredibly fucking attractive. Ridiculously attractive. Even after illness and grief had had their way with him, he was fucking gorgeous, both in a visceral physical sense (high, pronounced cheekbones and striking green eyes lined by dark lashes, the dramatic V of his hips, the wild way his hair started to curl when it got long) and in an abstract way that Mark can never quite put into words.

He reaches sluggishly around and stuffs his clean hand into his pocket, clenching it briefly around the strip of leather. The buckle is freezing against his overheated palm, a welcome counterpoint to the flood of testosterone keeping his dick hard and twitching and hoping. It isn't enough to calm him down, though.

He’s beginning to think that nothing ever will be. He’s going to be lusting after Roger like a cat in heat for the rest of his life and very possibly in the afterlife, if there is one.

Mark turns his head and lets out a hopeless whimper, muffled by the fabric of his pillowcase.

_Fuck, fuck, fuck._

Who needs a _real_ sex life anyway?

Apparently, Roger and the vague idea of the kinky shit he _might_ be getting up to is all Mark needs to get by.

* * *

 

The water abruptly shuts off and the wet slap of Roger’s feet on the bathroom tile has Mark jolting upright and straight out of his post-orgasmic coma, grabbing frantically for a tissue from the box on the floor beside his mattress. He cleans his fingers off as best he can without water, dabbing at the front of his jeans and at the splotch that landed on the bottom of his shirt, gingerly tucking himself away at the same time.

By the time Roger has emerged, pink-skinned from the hot water and naked except for a towel, Mark is sitting on the couch with a recent copy of the _Village Voice_ spread open on the coffee table before him.

“Are you cured?” he asks, attempting his usual brand of good-natured sarcasm and swallowing when his voice comes out slightly too rough.

Roger only grunts in response. Mark’s superstitious paranoia rears its ugly head.

He's aware in the back of his mind that it's ridiculous to be nervous, it's not like Roger can _read his mind_ and just _know_ he's been thinking dirty thoughts about him, but…

Well, what if he _can?_ Collins always _did_ say that they had a creepy telepathic roommate bond thing. The possibility, though slim, is there and refuses to stop running laps vigorously around the inside of his head, jostling ideas for screenplays and six second mental movies and his private, ever-growing collection of cherished moments with his friends that he’s been carefully picking and preserving ever since Roger had come home clutching that demonic piece of paper in his white-knuckled fist.

Goosebumps rise on the back of Mark’s neck as a hot breath ghosts over the shell of his ear, leftover adrenaline searing directly down to his groin.

 _What is he…?_ Oh God, what if Roger really _did_ know what he’d been doing while he was in the shower? His breath snags audibly, the temperature in the apparently very small space between them rising so sharply that he’s shocked his glasses haven’t fogged up.

The back of the couch creaks ominously as Roger leans his weight slowly forward, hair dripping onto Mark’s shoulder.

Mark can’t breathe at all, suddenly. _What if he’s not mad,_ his overly hopeful subconscious thinks wildly, _what if he wants to -_

“Hey.” Mark barely bites back a startled whimper. He’s so fucking worked up, and Roger hasn't even touched him yet.

Is this a good idea? Can he really go through with this, if Roger actually wants to-

“Your fly’s down,” Roger breathes, then walks away snickering to scavenge for coffee in the kitchen. The subsequent clattering, slamming, and quiet cursing strongly suggest that Roger is about to shamelessly steal the last clean mug before Mark can steep his afternoon tea.

The damp spots on the shoulders of Mark’s t-shirt suddenly feel very cold.

“Oh.” Mark says belatedly, unable to muster the appropriate amount of sarcasm and not at all surprised about it, this time. “Thanks.”


	2. day 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> day 1 prompts: spanking and aphrodisiacs

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter got ENTIRELY out of hand and I'm so sorry. Like I said, this was meant to be a quick, simple porn writing challenge and it became... this. Ahaha.. I'm posting it a day early because I spent nearly two horrific hours trying to rework the formatting between my Google doc and this website. Anyway. Enjoy :') Lots more to come!

It might, possibly, _potentially_ , have crossed Mark’s mind weeks later that he might have a bit of a fixation.

(Whether it's on Roger or the other thing is getting really hard to tell.)

But there's so much to do, between trying to scrape together enough cash to cover the completely, irrationally obscene rent that Benny is suddenly demanding every month and making sure Roger doesn't quietly skip on refilling his prescription like Mark’s caught him doing before just because he doesn't want Mark to have to pay for it, and worrying himself sick over Roger having an actual steady job again (though, he's not entirely sure what he's worried about: that Roger will pass out and crack his head open on the bar? That some skinhead might find out he’s positive, somehow, and make a scene and get him fired or worse? that some punk rock chick with smokey eye makeup will start batting her eyelashes at him over the bartop and he’ll slide free drinks over to her, and bring her home and Mark will have to pretend he's not dying inside while Roger is introducing them for the first time, and-)

(Fuck. He’s really got to get a grip on his imagination.

Anyway.)

With everything he’s got to juggle, it's a miracle that Mark even manages to drag his bike up and down the stairs every day. He’s never been so exhausted. Well, maybe when Roger was away for the two weeks he was in rehab, but that was a very horrific set of special circumstances which he hopes never to have to experience again. No, this isn't grief-tired, or even depression-tired (which he’s become intimately familiar with these past few years living in poverty)… All Mark really wants is a nice, long nap.

Preferably a nice long nap in which the loft will spontaneously decide to clean itself. A long, quiet, comfortable nap on a bed that’s less than fifteen years old, uninterrupted by awkward best friend sex dreams.

The collar stays in his pocket, except for when he takes it out (after checking and double checking that he’s definitely, 100% alone) to run his fingers over it and puzzle at which of his friends it might have belonged to.

It’s driving him up a wall that he doesn’t know, but it's not like he can just ask. That's not a conversation he wants to have with anyone. Hell, Maureen’s liable to tell him it's hers even if it's not, just to make him squirm.

Besides… He _wants_ it to be Roger’s. He wants it to be something that Roger has caressed and licked and maybe even strained his neck against, tugged on playfully as if he wanted out.

God, why is it so hard to just _not_ think about Roger naked?!

In Mark’s defense, though, ever since Mimi finally broke up with Roger, there's been this weird, tingly energy that builds up in the loft when it’s just the two of them. Or maybe Mark’s just imagining it. Maybe he’s just sex-crazed and stupidly infatuated, stupidly hopeful. Nothing about the loft _itself_ has changed, anyway. The windows are still grimy and in need of washing. The view is still depressing. The baseboards in the bathroom still have stubborn bloodstains that they just don't talk about. It's the same cluttered old apartment it always was, full of years and years worth of junk and their friends’ shit (Maureen’s sunglasses, Collins’ favorite bong which Mark had dropped and cracked that time three years ago that they’d all thought it was a great idea to camp out on the rooftop in the middle of July, partly because it felt sexy and bohemian to sprawl mostly-naked on Maureen’s collection of absurdly-soft decorative throw blankets when they were all stoned and pleasantly tipsy, drinking wine coolers because they’d run out of vodka half an hour ago before they’d come up) and booze and miscellaneous bags of stale chips. Nothing about it has really changed since Mark moved in, except that they’ve acquired _even more shit_ (including a TV), and now there’s no one else to fill the silence.

It’s just him and Roger here. Maybe that’s what's bugging him out. When Roger got back from rehab and spent all day in his room, it was different. April’s presence lingered in the air and made everything Roger said or did feel slightly melancholy, dulled the edges on everything except the parts that hurt. _Now_ , though, without Mimi frequenting Roger’s bedroom, with Roger leaving the apartment regularly and working and smoking and- and jerking off, which Mark only knows because he happened to be up at three getting a glass of water a few days ago and Roger was tragically, wonderfully incapable of being quiet when he came…

Now, with Roger behaving like he's actually alive (and apparently horny, without Mimi slipping up into his bedroom every night), Mark realizes he's in trouble.

The collar was just a catalyst, he reasons. It could have been anything. A pair of handcuffs, a half-empty bottle of lube… anything that might - _might!_ \- have been Roger’s, it would have been enough to set Mark’s blood running hot like he was on fucking fire.

He’s always wanted Roger a little bit. It’s just one of those things. Roger’s just one of those guys; everyone who met him back when Mark did wanted to touch him, taste him, fuck him. Even now, skinny and pale and world-weary, Mark wants to strip him naked and mouth over every single one of his countless tattoos. Wants to see him come apart, slack-jawed and reverent with pleasure. Wants to see his face all twisted up with how good it is… He wants to make Roger come.

Really, really wants it.

Mark can't deal with himself sometimes.

He’s always had a bad habit of obsessing over the littlest things. Just can't stop himself from thinking, thinking, thinking until his head was full of useless, minuscule details that he’ll remember a year from now and cringe.

And all of his friends _know_ that about him, which is why he thinks Collins comes down to offer him drugs as a going-away present.

“I think people generally give the person who’s _going away_ a present,” Mark muses aloud, peering at the innocuous little square paper tab that Collins had dropped into his palm. Collins gives him a shove, and Mark grins up at him cheekily. It’s obscenely early - which is to say that it was before 10 in the morning - and Roger is still groaning in the other room trying to rouse himself enough to come out and see their friend off properly. He sort of hopes that Roger has the decency to get dressed before he emerges so that he can't possibly get caught staring, but a larger part of him is hoping for the opposite.

The collar buckle digs into his upper thigh helpfully.

“Tsk, tsk, technicalities,” Collins said flippantly. He slung an arm around his shoulder and gestured with his other hand at the tab in Mark’s palm. “I was hoping to spend a little more time with you guys before I took off. Had a whole sleepover planned.”

“Sounds like a party,” Mark said drily. “So uh, what _is_ it, exactly?”

“Well, it’s not LSD, but it's sort of close.” Collins loudly sucks his lower lip into his mouth, shrugging. “Bromo-something. I’d tell you what it's actually called if I could remember all twelve of the syllables.”

“Sounds kosher. You tried it?”

“Of course,” Collins says. “What do you take me for? I don’t pass on anything I haven’t tested myself.”

Mark feels a warm swell of affection for his friend, smiling up at him apologetically. “I know. I’m just a little, uh, wary, of this kind of…” He trails off uncertainly.

Collins pats him lightly on the head and cheerfully ignores the face he makes in response. “It ain’t gonna kill you, Mark. Might even drain some of the fuzz out of that busy head of yours.”

“I don't think that LSD cures anxiety,” Mark says. “At least, that's not what my mom’s psychiatrist gave me for it.”

“Well they probably weren’t as enlightened as I am,” Collins laughed. “Seriously, give it a try. Can’t hurt.”

“So you say.”

He eyes the tab again with mild curiosity, already planning on foisting it off on one of his coworkers, but he can't deny that it's tempting. He’s somehow never had the opportunity to try hallucinogens and of all the illicit drugs that he’s been offered, or at least been proximate to, they seem… the least horrific. Mark actually thinks that the experience might outweigh the risks. Might give him some insight for his next documentary.

He’s still going to give it away, though.

Maybe a few years ago he’d have had the courage to do it, but the only way he’s putting this stuff in his mouth is if someone else is doing it with him. And Roger’s not into drugs anymore, period, much less party drugs that at best make you see pretty colors.

“What the fuck? You’re giving Mark acid and not _me?_ ” Roger complains, padding out into the living room predictably half-naked. Mark wills himself not to look.

“It's not acid. Good morning to you too, Davis.” Collins snorts and releases Mark to grab Roger around the shoulder’s in a bone-crushing hug. “How many times have I told you to eavesdrop well or not at all?” Roger struggles in his grip, and Collins merely clicks his tongue and musses his overgrown hair even more. “Amateur.”

“Well, what’ve you got there then? Looks like blotter paper to me.” Roger wrinkles his nose when he finally escapes, amused and peering at his own little tab. Mark frowns at him, hard. Roger doesn't even look up in time to notice. He doesn't give Collins time to answer his first question either, suddenly pouting. “Wait - you’re not staying to play with us, then?”

“Can’t!” Sighing, Collins glances at the door. “Have to be in Boston by six tonight if I want to make some extra moo-lah before my summer classes start up.” He grimaces dramatically, clutching at his chest and staggering backward. “Lord help me teach these hopeless peons.”

“Amen,” Mark and Roger drawl in unison.

On closer inspection, Collins looks remarkably well-rested - and genuinely happy, which still eases some of the ache in Mark’s chest every time he sees it, even six months after the first glimpse - but Mark knows he’s been working more doggedly than ever to keep up with the payments on Angel’s most recent hospital visit. He wants to ask about that but he doesn't dare, afraid to bring it up and drag down the mood, afraid because he doesn't actually have any help to offer. His spending money for the month, after rent and utilities and groceries and film, is well under twenty bucks.

Roger doesn't seem as burdened. In fact, he looks eager, looking up at Mark with his green eyes gleaming like he wants something and he isn't going to leave Mark alone until he gets it.

“No.” Mark says automatically.

“Come on, Mark!” Roger whines, crowding closer to him, and Mark has to stare determinedly at the far wall to keep from falling to his knees right there and giving Roger anything, anything he wants. God, he needs to get laid. “You can't say no to acid, for fuck’s sake.”

“Not acid,” Collins repeated emphatically, smacking him lightly upside the head. “Same precautions apply, though. Give yourself a good eighteen hours to ride it out.”

 _Eighteen hours?!_ Mark is starting to hear warning bells. He glances nervously between Collins and Roger, but neither of them seems remotely concerned about this. Just Mark, then. Being the futile voice of reason, as usual.

“It _is_ hallucinogenic, but not as vivid,” Collins explains. “It’s a research chemical. Mostly harmless, just a little intense. My esteemed colleague did warn me that it had some other more, ah… earthly effects, though. Which I can attest to.”

“Earthly?” Mark mumbles, eyebrows drawing together. The way Collins is smirking leaves little to the imagination, leaving him even more incredibly apprehensive than before. He still feels the need to ask, “What does that _mean_?”

“Who cares!” Roger scoffs, waving a hand carelessly. He looks at Collins like he might kiss him. “You’re a true friend, Tom. A hero. Bringing us free booze, free research chemicals...”

“All in a day’s work,” Collins says airily. He regards both of them with the same fond, perhaps-slightly-devious smile and Mark mentally gulps. “I’m trusting you with this, man. Show Mark a good time, okay? You both could use it.”

“We have fun,” Mark protests. “We watched a movie and played beer pong last night.”

“By yourselves?” Collins raises an eyebrow.

“Hey!” Roger snaps. “Don’t judge. I won.”

Collins claps him on the shoulder indulgently. “And I’m happy for you. But this shit is a little bit more potent than a six pack of gas station beer, alright?” His expression turns serious for a moment. “Promise you’ll be careful.”

“You don’t have to worry about me,” Mark sighs, resigning himself to tripsitting. Hopefully that wouldn't involve cleaning up puke at four in the morning… or steam-cleaning the couch. Again. “Have fun on your trip, Col. Bring us back a tacky keychain or something.”

“Speak for your damn self,” Roger says quickly. “I want a tacky shot glass.”

“That can be arranged.” Collins turns on a heel with a flourish, grinning. “Love to stay and chat but I’ve gotta run. Ang has the car running.” That any of them can afford to own a car is another sign that things are looking up around here, slowly but surely. “Don’t miss me too much!”

Mark misses him already, but he smiles and waves goodbye and pretends that he isn’t dismayed (and inappropriately excited) to be left with only Roger for company for the next week.

It looks like asking Collins for advice on kicking his fixation is out for now. He’ll just have to endure; and who knows? Maybe by this time next week he’ll have moved on to lusting after the redheaded guy with the mustache who’d just moved in on the third floor.

 _He hasn’t got those eyelashes, though,_ his subconscious reminds him unhelpfully. _Or those guitar callouses. Mmm…_

Mark closes his eyes and counts to three, trying to banish the sudden mental image of Roger’s tattooed knuckles staring up at him from where his hands are wrapped tightly around his hips.

Alright, plan B: he’d come up with an idea for a shiny new screenplay. Tried and true. He’d spend two years hating it and obsessing over it and never finish it, but for _now_ it would keep his mind off of the possibility that the line he could faintly make out in the front of Roger's boxers was lingering morning wood. And that’s all that really matters.

For his part, Roger hasn’t been in such a good mood since Christmas last year. He’s practically bouncing on the balls of his feet with excitement when the distant thuds of Collins’ boots on the stairs finally disappear, and he rounds on Mark like the harbinger of bad decisions. There are still pillowmarks pinkly creasing the left side of his face.

“So.” he wheedles, flashing his most winning smile. “Trip with me tonight?”

“Tonight?” Mark turns away and discreetly brushes the heel of his palm over his pocket, the shape of the collar oddly calming. The door remains firmly closed, devoid of convenient interruptions or distractions.

“I have to work,” he reminds him weakly.

“After that. You have tomorrow off,” Roger gloated, hooking his thumb smugly in the direction of the fridge. The dry erase board magnetted to the door read “WEEKLY SCHEDULE” in Mark’s enlarged, distinctive chicken scratch. It had seemed like a great idea when he’d bought it; Mark hadn’t ever imagined it betraying him like this. “Don’t even try to lie to me, Cohen.”

“Calling me Cohen isn’t going to convince me to do drugs with you,” he mutters.

“Oh come on, Mark, if you won’t do drugs with _me_ , who _can_ you do them with?”

“No one!” Mark shot him a startled frown.

“Okay.” Roger nodded, pretending to consider his words carefully. “Then we’re tripping together tonight. Just you, me, and this couch.” He patted the back of it fondly. “If it's anything like the shit I’ve done, it will be really relaxed. Nothing to worry about, dude. You won’t be disappointed.”

Mark wonders if Roger is _trying_ to be seductive, or if his hips really just happened to arch like that on “relaxed”.

“Listen, Rog, I don’t think it's a good idea.” He focuses on worrying his lower lip, not quite meeting Roger’s eyes.

“Oh, calm down.” Roger snorts, looking at him with the same infuriatingly superior look he’d given Mark the very first night they knew each other, when Mark had asked if he _always_ had sex wherever the hell he wanted and Roger had told him that it was a free country. “You’ve never tripped before, have you. It's not like _heroin_ , Mark, it's like weed. But better.”

The way he says it makes it clear that he’s speaking in _Illegal Drugs for Dummies_ for Mark’s sake. Mark forces down his growing irritation.

“I didn’t say it was, Roger. I just don't think it's a good idea. Collins doesn't even know what this shit _is,_ why would I want to take it? We don’t even know what it does.”

The second it leaves his mouth, Mark realizes his mistake. Roger’s grin turns feral. He hasn’t seen that smile in _years_ ; despite himself, he feels his dick stiffening against the seam of his work pants.

“That’s half the fun,” Roger purrs.

Mark shifts uncomfortably. “I’ve got to go to work,” he blurts out, and before Roger can work any more black magic on his libido he’s dragging his bike out the door.

 

* * *

 

_Well. It’s definitely not LSD._

Mark is relatively certain that what he’s taken is actually ecstasy. Not that he’s ever experienced that before, mind you, but he imagines this must be what it’s like: feeling simultaneously disoriented, giggly, and excruciatingly aroused by everything he touches.

The high had come on all at once, a heady rush that started somewhere at the base of his skull and flooded outward to the tips of his fingers, pulsing in all of his joints and, oddly, in his tailbone, which had him wriggling and reaching back to press his fingertips to it, gasping at the pleasant throb of the indents they left. The walls appeared to be breathing in the semi-darkness, but for some reason that was comforting rather than terrifying. He’d realized dimly that his ability to gauge temperature had disappeared completely, leaving him feeling somehow numb and hypersensitive at once.

Mark lays spread-eagled on his back and stares at the ceiling in awe.

It’s so far out of the realm of his experience that he can’t even find the words to describe most of it. He wants to, though - wants to reach over the side of the bed and fumble for a pen and a notebook, or a napkin, or _anything_ because he has to document every second of this, because this is the kind of shit he’s only ever read about - but his muscles feel… weird, and loose, and like he could roll off the face of the earth if he isn’t careful, and so he stays exactly where he is and just breathes.

He wishes that Roger was here with him. Rather, he wishes that _he_ was still out in the living room with Roger.

When he’d gotten home from work at 8, Roger had taken one look at him and dragged him over to the couch, where he sat down practically in Mark’s lap and leaned in until their foreheads touched. Mark could feel his breath puffing warmly against his cheek.

“Look, Mark,” he’d said sternly, one hand still loosely wrapped up in the collar of his shirt. “If you’re really that worried, you don't have to do it, but _I’m_ going to take advantage of Collins’ incredible generosity-” Here he leaned back and held up the tab between his fingers, opening his mouth and placing it directly on the center of his tongue for Mark to see, right beside the gleaming silver stud. “And it's going to be fucking excellent.”

“Okay,” Mark had said breathlessly, unable to stop staring at Roger’s lips, his pulse already racing. “Um.”

“It’s a lot more fun when someone is tripping with you,” Roger had said pointedly. His expression softened a little when Mark remained stiff and uncomfortable beneath him; sliding out of his lap, Roger reached up and gripped Mark’s shoulder, rubbing it with his thumb. Reassuring. “I’d make sure you had fun, you know.”

“I- I know,” Mark had said distractedly. “I trust you.”

He did. He trusted Roger implicitly, the same way Roger trusted him… which made it sixty times worse that all he could think about lately was getting in his pants.

It was then, as he was staring at the stubble on Roger’s jaw with his breath caught in his throat at the idea that he could just lean forward and press his mouth there, that Mark realized he actually really did need to relax. He _could_ just have a beer and settle here on the couch to keep an eye on Roger; but when else was he going to have an opportunity like this?

Roger had _always_ been the wild one. Mark had wanted to be him, once. He was a fucking nerd. A wannabe artist pretending to fit into the queer that Roger and Collins and Maureen all occupied. City life was intimidating and gritty and full of risks, and while Mark felt perfectly at home here, now, there was still a lot that he’d missed out on in his hesitance back when he was just a kid out of his depth, watching his friends enviously from behind his camera while they made stupid, impulsive choices, while they kissed and cried and fucked and felt _alive_.

And here was his chance to do something daring for once. Something more significant than standing on a table with his friends. To get just a _little_ glimpse into what it was like to go out and party, without the anxiety attacks.

Roger may not be the party guy he used to be, but evidently he still knew how to have fun. _Must be like riding a bike._

“You can swallow it now,” Roger had said five minutes later, and Mark had, nervously, smiling reluctantly in the face of Roger’s triumphant glow.

Three and a half hours later, Mark had thrown his hands up and retreated to his bedroom, tired and disappointed. He felt fine. _Normal._ Not one measly little symptom to be had. The hardwood looked just as dusty and lackluster as it had before he’d stuck that stupid tab in his mouth, no vibrant colors, no dancing lights.

Roger had insisted over and over again that sometimes the onset for this type of drug was a little delayed, but three and a half hours was far from _little_ in Mark’s book, and he was beginning to feel like an idiot for being excited in the first place.

Now, he felt like an idiot for not believing Roger, who had probably done more drugs in his lifetime than most of their other friends put together. (Although with Collins, he was could never be sure.)

But it didn't bother him much. Nothing really bothered him right now. He felt free and floaty and oddly content, even though all his worldly woes were very much still _there_ lined up in his mind, peering at him worriedly; they were _there_ , and he was aware of them, but they just didn’t seem very dire. Life had a dreamlike quality right now, both in and outside of his head, which Mark thinks is just fucking _beautiful_ , just perfect, just…

 _Relaxed_.

He really needs to apologize to Roger for doubting him earlier. Roger clearly knew what he was talking about, and Mark was a stuck-up, clueless peasant who didn’t know the meaning of the word _fun_. Except now he did - know the meaning, that is, and it's all thanks to Roger, who was a perfect wonderful friend for coercing him into this. Mark is feeling very lightheaded. The words are tumbling around his head like it's a dryer on the highest setting; for once, bits of scenes and dialogue and mental photographs of the pigeons in the park, or the huddle of people smoking outside the diner, or Roger laughing with his head thrown back because of something that Mark said, black nail polish striped wet over the back of his hand, they've all disappeared and left him with just this moment. Just this one enormous moment, shrunken down to fine points

Mark should be out there experiencing this with Roger, he thinks: every odd tremor, prickle, and random, brilliant flash of color or movement in his peripheral. Roger - who had convinced him to take just _one more shot_ too many times to count, who had been the one to finally convince him that getting completely stoned once in awhile wouldn’t kill his brain cells or his future career, and that even if it did, it would be so fucking worth it that it wouldn’t even matter - Roger would be _so pleased_ at how much he was enjoying this. He was going to tell Roger all about it. Every detail! And then the bastard could recite it all back to him in two days when his ability to string multiple coherent sentences together has returned from the void.

His hand is already halfway into his pants when he makes up his mind to try and get up and do exactly that.

Sitting up is a challenge in itself, considering that moving his head at all whatsoever is causing his thoughts to slide around and rearrange themselves like they're floating in half-set Jell-O, but with the image of Roger still sitting sprawled out on the couch now fixed in the forefront of his wobbly mind he manages it. Standing is even more fun. His bedroom floor is like a maze, and the doorknob feels strangely wet against his skin, just like the floor feels beneath his bare feet.

Mark has never felt so off-balance in his life, or so delighted to be walking sideways, hanging onto the wall the whole way. The light from the lamp in the living room is momentarily blinding and he’s still squinting when he stumbles out toward the couch, grinning when he sees the blurry shape of Roger still sprawled out across the length of it.

Actually, the whole loft is blurry now that he thinks about it. Hmmm. He doesn’t remember taking his glasses off.

It gets swept away with all of his other worries, though, as he climbs up over the back of the couch and tumbles directly onto Roger’s chest.

“Jesus Christ! Mark!” Roger yelps, but instead of shoving him off he throws his arms around him and crushes him close like he’s afraid he’ll fall off and disappear into the ether. “What the fuck, I thought you went to bed.”

“Can’t sleep,” Mark says, shrugging languidly and burying his nose in Roger’s neck just below his ear. He can feel the metal hoop of Roger’s earring against his eyebrow. Guilt rises half-heartedly in his gut only to dissipate when it meets the miasma of whatever weird chemical Mark’s ingested.

 _Bromo-something_. When he's sober again, he’s so going to have to look into this.

“Yeah, I don’t think we’re gonna be sleeping anytime soon.” Roger’s voice is husky and slightly amused, which is just not fair. Mark’s already hard and he can hardly even remember why that's a bad thing, or why he should bother trying to hide it. His legs stretch out behind him and kick the already-abused arm of the couch, making the whole thing groan, which has them both dissolving into a fit of raucous laughter for a moment.

Roger withdraws one of his hands to reach down and wipe his eyes, chest still heaving erratically as he tries to stem the flow. “Fuck, Mark, I really hope you're having fun because I am.”

_Relaxed._

And he really was.

“So much,” Mark huffs into his neck, still shaking with stupid, drug-induced laughter, his cock achingly full and pressing against his zipper. “So much fun.” And then, because he's still thinking about it, “Ugh, Jell-O sounds really good right now.”

“Do we have some?” For a moment Roger sounds as distracted as he is. From this position, Mark can feel the vibration of his vocal cords before he even hears his voice, which seems very poetic. “I’m gonna look.”

He twists like he’s actually going to go look and Mark, unwilling to let him go, wraps his arms and legs around him like an octopus and curls in tight. Roger laughs and laughs and laughs. The sky outside is still pitch-black, the city beneath it glowing neon and glittering chrome; Roger’s stubble grazes his cheek as he tries a second time to sit up, and Mark lurches forward to try and force him back down, though he can hardly muster the strength to shove anything.

“Nooo… don't move…” he moans as another wave of vertigo makes him still for a long moment. “You’re so comfy…”

“I do make an excellent pillow,” Roger says thoughtfully, and then suddenly jerks out from under Mark with a triumphant “ha!”, too fast for Mark to keep up with. Mark has no fucking idea how he managed it, because right now he’s not even sure he could handle catching a ball, much less extricating himself from the makings of an all-night cuddle pile. He’s licking his lips, which is _so_ extremely unfair that Mark can feel his rational brain crying somewhere in the background.

“No fair,” Mark says dreamily and without so much as a frown. “I make a terrible pillow, anyway. You don't want to lay on me.”

He’s half-serious, because Maureen had complained about his bony knees and elbows and hips at _length_ when they were together, but Roger knows all about that. Roger has known him way too long, and is entirely too comfortable twisting them around and falling on top of Mark like a deadweight.

“So… how do you feel?” Roger says, though it sounds strangely thick and slightly distant. “Have you ascended to the astral plane yet?” His fingers are drumming sluggishly along Mark’s ribcage, too slowly to tickle, too fast to be deliberately seductive. Mark’s heart rate escalates anyway.

“Gonna make a movie about it?” Roger continues, but it sounds more fond than like he’s taking the piss, and that makes Mark want to kiss him.

Fuck, he wants to kiss him.

Why _isn’t_ he supposed to kiss Roger, again?

“I feel… awake,” Mark says slowly, wondering at the molasses way the words fill up his mouth before they leave it. It’s like his blood’s been replaced with syrup. His cock’s so full and hard and achingly ready that he thinks it might just stay that way forever. What would Roger even do if Mark leaned up and mashed their lips together? Right now, just like that?

An uneven, almost-nervous giggle escapes his throat at the thought, whatever he was about to say catching and then floating away.

“We should go streaking.” Roger makes a low noise of agreement with Mark’s words and lifts his head to peer at him, eyes too-sharp, too-intense, so much that Mark wants to look away but he's too lethargic, too aware of his own body right now. “We should… we should go camp on the roof.”

“Really sucked last time,” Mark points out, but if Roger wants to go up there and lie on the concrete with him under the stars, Mark will do it in a heartbeat. The view is a lot nicer from up there than it is from their grimy windows, somehow. The stars right now would probably look like fucking diamonds, if even their shitty unkempt living room is blowing his mind. He can imagine it: the shimmering dark rippling cold and distant above them, the startling light emanating from the city below like heat rising to combat it in a rainbow of neon. Stunning visuals. Mark suddenly wonders if he could make a movie taking place entirely on the roof, and because everything sounds like an incredible idea right now, he feels his heart lurch with almost childish excitement at the thought. “I’unno if I can climb a ladder right now.”

The world is still lurching unevenly around him, but Mark is increasingly too caught up in the prickle of arousal climbing his spine and dancing along the length of his dick to care. Roger is _right here_ , settled between his legs with his head on Mark’s chest contentedly like he belongs there, and Mark’s sloppy Jell-O mind can only seem to retain images from his most recent jerk-off session in the shower, in which fantasy Roger had shoved him up against the shower wall and molested him with his tongue in his ear and his fingers bruising his hips.

Brushing his hips again. Groping. At his pocket. “Hey,” Roger says suddenly, “What’ve you got here?” and through the slow sound of his syrupy blood rushing in his ears Mark realizes he actually expects an answer.

He struggles to sit up. Roger shoves him back down and rubs his hand deliberately along the shape of the collar still bunched up in his pocket.

It’s unfortunately very close to his dick, so Mark goes very, very still, deer-in-the-headlights still, and blinks his startled-sleepy eyes up at Roger in what he hopes resembles innocence. _I Touch Myself_ begins playing on a loop in his head, emanating from some pop culture obsessed corner of his psyche.

The way Roger is squinting at the front of his pants kills the thought before he can even attempt to articulate it aloud, which... might be for the best.

“None of your business.” He tries to say it smoothly but his mouth still feels sticky and sugary, and the words come out without much conviction.

_I don’t want, an-y-bo-dy else!_

“I found it,” he tries again, because honesty is the best policy and all that crap. Mark is finding it hard to take any of this completely seriously; right now he’s overwhelmed with the electric current of excited anticipation that's started under his skin from the way Roger is staring at him, although he can't tell if it's amused or intrigued or mocking or _interested_.

It occurs to him that he should be slightly more upset about the possibility that he's entirely _wrong_. It’s just, he just can't focus for long enough to worry.

“Well, well, well,” Roger says, voice gone an octave lower and smooth like honey. It's unfair that his voice sounds so steady suddenly when Mark still feels like a particularly uncoordinated seal everytime he has to move or talk or even just focus for five consecutive seconds. His erection’s diverted all of the blood that should be in his head, so that he doesn't even have the wherewithal to bat Roger away a second time when he shoves his hand down his pocket unceremoniously and jerks the collar out into the open, holding it up between them like a trophy. Tags dangling.

 _When I think about you, I touch myself,_ Mark’s traitorous brain warbles soulfully.

Roger must not be able to hear it, or else he wouldn't have continued, huskily, “What've you been getting up to that I don't know about, hm?”

It’s a voice that Mark would have registered as _danger_ if he was even remotely sober, but now that he’s tripping out of his mind - staring at Roger’s lips in wonder, at the dancing yellow lights surrounding his head, thinking about _how fucking great this shit is_ and all of the things that he’s going to have to write down when he can handle getting up and finding a piece of paper - all he registers is _Roger’s looking at me_ , and that's why it comes as such a shock when Roger starts struggling to haul him upright, grabbing him roughly by the hips and the shoulders and, briefly, his hair. He gives it a yank like he fucking _means it_ and some sex depraved part of Mark just about breaks down in happy tears.

“Ohhhhh, fuck,” Mark hears himself groan, nerves lighting up hot and cold in rapid succession down the length of his spine.

The apartment still appears to be swaying when Roger is done yanking him around and setting him upright so that they’re staring at each other head on, lips hardly centimeters apart.

“You know what this is, Mark?” Roger murmurs. There's a new manic gleam in his eyes, and his fingers curled around Mark’s bicep have tightened. “A claim. Someone thinks they fucking _own_ you. Who have you been...” Evidently, he notices Mark’s eyes darting back to the collar again and again, because his face goes curiously blank as he interrupts himself. “What, do you want it back?

“Erm…”

Mark really, really doesn’t want it back, because he really, really doesn't want Roger to stop touching him. It seems very logical to shake his head, reaching up instead for Roger’s neck, fingers hesitantly curling there at the nape of it, feeling the soft, short hairs there.

“You want it back, Mark?” Roger asks again, his cheeks flushed pink and Mark is a hundred thousand percent certain now that what he means is _are you seeing someone?_

“No,” he gasps, shaking his head vigorously, “I’m not, I don’t- there's no one, Roger, I just- it just makes me-”

“You want me to put this on you?” Roger asks, before he can even get out a full sentence, and his voice is hoarse now with wanting. Mark gapes at him, blood singing in his ears -

Roger doesn't kiss him. He bites. Mark’s lower lip is going to be swollen for days; he feels his fingers scrabbling at Roger’s chest and neck and shoulders, desperate to drag him closer, desperate to suck his teasing flicker of tongue into his mouth but Roger seems like he’s got a pretty solid idea of how he wants this to go, and he seems at least marginally more sober than Mark, so Mark finally lets his fingers go slack and just opens his mouth to whatever Roger demands.

This is evidently the right thing to do. Roger groans, really lets loose, a noise that Mark hasn't heard once in the months since Roger’s gotten laid, and he’s suddenly _intimately_ acquainted with the seam of his jeans again.

“Fuck, Mark,” he snarls, casting the collar to the side carelessly. The words come bursting out of him like he’s been holding them back furiously for years, or maybe that’s just Mark projecting again. “ _No one else_ , no one else gets to own you.”

“No,” Mark echoes, choked and trembling pleasantly as Roger’s fingers brush over his lips - with strange, gentle reverence - and then, suddenly, start grabbing at his clothes. “Nnh- Roger, fuck, I want…” He honestly doesn't know what to ask for first - there's too much, too many pent up fantasies, there's just too many fucking possibilities. Instinctively he arches his back, putting his hands up and out of the way.

It's clear who’s going to be taking charge between them, and Mark is _extremely_ okay with that.

Roger pushes his shirt up his stomach, slides off the couch and onto his knees to press his lips to it, and starts kissing roughly downward. His stubble is burning in the best way. Mark shifts and struggles to breathe - never, _never_ has he been so fucking hard - as Roger pushes his nose into his thigh and along the taut line of his cock straining the denims. The flash of his tongue ring is quick and brilliant and it takes Mark entirely too long to realize that he’s _licking_ -

“Fucking hell, Roger, I can't-” Mark moans, fingers scrabbling for purchase and finding it in Roger’s hair.

Roger stops what he's doing and looks up sharply. Mark blinks his eyes back open in slightly desperate confusion, already horribly close to coming, not close enough.

“Bad,” Roger growls. “No pulling.”

In a rare moment of misguided daring, Mark feels his lips twitch up into a smile and gives his hair another quick tug, before hastily releasing it. “What if that's what gets me off?”

“Is it?”

Before Mark knows what’s happened, Roger’s knocked his hand away and surged up over him again, shoving him sideways and manhandling him onto his stomach and over his lap. His cock is trapped now against Roger’s thigh, his torso hanging over awkwardly with his head almost touching the floor. He grabs for the side of the couch to pull himself back up, breathless and increasingly desperate.

The first smack is so hard that even through his jeans it stings a little. Mark whimpers as he rocks forward with the force of it, hips jerking up involuntarily against Roger’s thigh. The friction makes his mouth water and whatever he might have said in protest vanishes in the heat of it; a second smack follows the first, quick and hard and his hips jerk again. Mark lets go of the couch and digs his nails into his palms instead, gasping. “Fu-uck, Roger, what are you-?”

“I know you want this,” Roger says, back to honey-smooth and dangerous. Except now he’s panting, slightly, and Mark can feel the hard length of his cock nudging at his belly. Another hard smack and Mark loses his concentration, rocking forward eagerly this time.

“Know you jerk off thinking about me.” Roger’s palm connects with Mark’s ass again, and Mark makes a wordless, needy noise that's meant to indicate that he _needs his pants off_ , now, please, but Roger’s on a roll and it's like he's directing every word directly to Mark’s throbbing cock. “Fuck, I’ve wanted to do this. You have no fucking idea. _Months_ , Mark.” He makes a vicious, satisfied noise when Mark practically sobs, rubs his thigh up deliberately so that Mark can't help but fucking up against it, faster and more erratically. “I see you looking at me when you think I’m not paying attention. Like you wanna shove your hand down your pants right there and bring yourself off for me.” The image sticks in Mark’s mind and won’t leave; he suspects it may never leave now that Roger has put it there - Roger, across the room and watching intently, smirking and twirling his finger in the air as if to say _get on with it_ , and Mark panting and biting his lip while he pumps his dick until it’s weeping, until Roger can’t take his eyes off it, until Roger starts to wander closer...

Roger’s voice gets lower somehow, blends into the weird thrumming energy of the loft around them. “You know what, Mark?”

 _What?!_ Mark thinks desperately. “Wh-aaa,” he whimpers, too distracted by the accelerating pump of his hard dick against his jeans, against the solid wall of Roger’s leg, it's like Roger is jerking him off without even touching his skin. Mark thinks about the collar and how it would feel around his throat, about Roger’s hand and how it would feel around his cock. He’s so close, so close- close- _cl-ose-!_

“I’ve been jerking off thinking about you too,” Roger breathes.

The next smack lands right between his cheeks, hard and jolting and in seconds Mark is coming in hot, wet spurts against the front of his pants.

Somehow, in the next five hazy minutes of ecstatic floating, Mark finds himself dragged back up onto the couch until he and Roger are face to face, horizontal, their foreheads pressed tightly together and Roger’s fist moving in fast, frantic jerks in the small space between their hips, his breath coming in humid puffs against Mark’s cheek.

Mark clutches onto his roommate like a life preserver. If he was floating in Jell-O before, now he’s drowning in it, and he doesn't even _care_. As far as he’s concerned he never has to care about anything _ever again,_ because Roger is moaning loud and unabashed and his dick is brushing against Mark’s bare stomach on every upstroke, smearing pre-come all in the fine blond hair of his happy trail, and when he comes it’s Mark’s name bitten out like a curse word.

He opens his mouth belatedly, struggling to find words that make sense. Roger cracks an eye open and lunges forward to grab him by the back of the neck - with his non-sticky hand, thankfully - and yank him into a brutal, bruising kiss.

“Mmhph,” Mark says profoundly, parting his lips to Roger’s insistent tongue.

The walls continue to breathe around them, and the strange energy has settled into a low, happy hum. Roger kisses him like he's trying to memorize the inside of his mouth. Like he really does own him, or is planning on it. Like he’s been wanting to have Mark pliant and half-underneath him for long enough that it's started to drive him a little crazy.

Mark finds himself suddenly very, very glad that Collins hadn’t stayed to do this with them after all.

The collar lies innocently on the floor, exactly where Mark had found it.

 

 


	3. day 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> day 2 prompt: dirty talk

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ... alright, this chapter ALSO got out of hand. I had a lot of fun writing it though, and I hope it's decent. I didn't have a whole lot of time to revise. The formatting issues have continued, to my eternal frustration. Enjoy the fruits of my labor.

“Ooh… I missed _all_ the fun.”

The first thing that Mark is consciously aware of is Mimi’s simpering voice.

The second thing that he's aware of is how fucking loud everything is. Even things that shouldn't technically be sounds at all. His senses are still all fucked up, wires crossed. The _sunshine_ is loud, turning the backs of his eyelids red. Mimi’s voice feels like it's about to puncture his eardrum, and the clomp of her (scary, Mark imagines) high-heeled boots on the hardwood is like a series of gunshots, which Mark is now seriously wishing were directed at his head.

Unfortunately, the _third_ thing that he realizes is that his pants are dangling somewhere in the vicinity of his ankles, and Roger’s arms are curled around him like a vice, pinning him to the couch for the foreseeable future.

“Fuck- I’m not decent,” Mark croaks pitifully, squeezing his eyes shut even more tightly to no avail.

“I can see that,” Mimi says drily.

If he weren't so hungover Mark would already be up and scurrying frantically for the safety of his bedroom, where he could barricade himself in with the boxes and boxes of old film reels and abandoned screenplays and have his existential crisis in peace. No scrutiny! No judgement! He’s not even sure he's fully conscious and he already can _feel_ Mimi’s amusement still emanating from the kitchen.

Mimi was actually around practically all the time, even now that she and Roger were long over. She hadn’t let the breakup deter her. Seemingly oblivious to Roger’s gray, wounded looks those first few weeks, she’d continued to flounce through their door (or sometimes the window, if it was sunny) like nothing was amiss and plop onto the couch between the two of them to steal some of Mark’s chips and ask him if he’d watch the new _Indiana Jones_ movie with her for the umpteenth time, when there was a perfectly good, brand new copy of _Dead Poet’s Society_ sitting right there on top of the VCR.

And no matter how much Roger had huffed and pouted about it, she’d just kept coming back.

“Are you feeling sore today?” Mimi asks idly, though Mark is imagining a cheshire-cat-esque grin on her face. “Or is Roger?”

“Neither?!” Mark says, scandalized.

It _might_ be partly Mimi’s fault, too, that Mark and Roger have this weird, warm energy buzzing between them, because it always seemed to start up the moment she left them to traipse back downstairs and get ready for bed. At least, Mark wants to blame it on her. It's less scary, less real to assume that Roger’s lapse last night had more to do with his tangled leftover feelings for his recently-ex girlfriend than that he actually has feelings for _Mark_.

Because if he does - have feelings, that is - then that means Mark’s chances of fucking this up spectacularly have just _skyrocketed_.

You can't irreversibly fuck up your friendship with your embarrassing crush if the other person doesn't have a single shred of interest in you the same way.

No, he concludes as he continues trying to feebly wriggle one of his arms free from the cage of Roger’s limbs: it's much more likely that Roger was just blue-balled and delirious last night. Roger hasn't done any proper post-breakup binging, and this was his way of rebounding. Which, well. Maybe that was a little rude of him. Or it would be. If Mark wasn't absolutely gagging for it.

But since Mark _is_ a creepy terrible friend, he can hardly judge.

He resolves not to say anything about it when Roger wakes up. Not that he needs to worry about that right now, because Roger sleeps like the dead when he's hungover, and if he’s experiencing even _half_ of the blinding headache that Mark is, he probably wouldn't want to be awake for it anyway.

“Fine, lie to me. See if I care.” Mimi’s clomp-clomping boots approach once more, and Mark cracks an eye open in time to see the fuzzy outline of her torso as she bends down and sets what he can only hope is approximately four aspirin on the coffee table beside a single glass of water. “Take this, at least. It looks like whatever you took knocked you flat on your skinny white boy asses.”

Mark doesn't know what to say, so instead he just stares at the gift longingly, still unsure that he can actually reach that far without Roger getting pissy.

Mimi’s hair is spilling over her shoulder unusually artfully, which Mark assumes - although, he still doesn't know where the fuck his glasses are, so he can't really properly tell or appreciate it - means that she's tied it back today. Actually, Mark is starting to notice a lot of things that are different about Mimi this morning. It throws him off. She seems to have replaced her usual ensemble with a form-fitting green sweater and black mini-skirt, managing somehow to look both professional and sexy. She’s wearing the necklace that Benny gave her on their third date, a fine silver thing dangling a diamond. The big hoop earrings she favored has been replaced with little glimmers at her earlobes - Mark assumes that they're diamond studs. Even blind as a bat, Mark is getting the feeling that Mimi is all dressed up and ready to go somewhere or do something Important.

“Thanks,” he mumbles awkwardly. “You, uh... you look nice.”

“The flattery is a lot more authentic when I know you can see,” she laughs. “You’re just trying to get rid of me so you can have your morning after sex, I know.” When he makes a noise of protest in the back of his throat she talks louder, drowning him out blithely.

“Shh, shh, shhhhhh! Maybe I’ll let you redeem yourself- _if_ you give me all the dirty details.”

Mark wonders if she’s going out on a date. It would make a lot of sense if she was seeing someone new, considering she hadn’t come to invade their space at all yesterday; in fact, it was long overdue. Mimi was too young and too hot to be depriving herself the joys of being young and hot.

 _Good for her!_ Mark thinks automatically. He loves Roger, he does, it's just that with Mimi the age gap between them had just seemed… terribly awkward sometimes.

He was, of course, happy for her. But at the same time…

 _Shit._ Well. Roger probably wouldn't be stoked, but he’d live.

“Wh- No deal,” he splutters belatedly when he remembers that they're having a conversation. _Why, why are we having a conversation?_ He’s hungover and his eyes hurt, his fingertips ache, and... The thought of telling anyone about this before he's even had a chance to process what actually happened is giving him more anxiety than he knows how to handle in this state. “Nothing happened. It was just a- a weird night.”

_Really fucking weird._

Maybe if he sticks to that story until she's forgotten that he's currently wrapped up half-naked in Roger’s arms, she'll eventually believe him.

“Did Collins give you the sex ed talk before he left?” she asks, pointedly.

There’s something purple dangling from her pinky. Mark squints at it in the hopes that it will be enough of a distraction to change the subject, muttering defensively, “What’re you doing here anyway?”

It occurs to him the moment it leaves his mouth that that’s actually pretty fucking rude of him to say. She’s already made a joke about him wanting to get rid of her and here he is confirming it. _Oh God, I’m the worst friend._

He's already mentally scrambling for an apology when Mimi pats the top of his head lightly.

“Mark! Relax!” she exclaims, with no regard for how much the sound would echo painfully inside his skull. He groans in weak protest. “I’m just here to grab my favorite mug before I forget - which by the way, tell loverboy that he owes me a new one for chipping it.”

 _Oh, that was actually me,_ Mark thinks guiltily.

His mouth, however, is thankfully leagues behind his brain, and by the time he’s managed to mentally articulate yet another apology Mimi is sitting down primly on the edge of the cushion by their feet, holding what is presumably the mug in her lap.

“Come on, tell me before I go,” she says casually, though her eyes are probably gleaming with interest. Mark really wishes he could see. She lowers her voice, gleeful. “Did he suck you off?”

“Mimi!” Mark chokes, scandalized. Without thinking he begins struggling to extricate himself again, to sit up, violently jostling Roger’s arms in the process and drawing a sleepy growl from his roommate’s chest.

He freezes.

 _Don’t wake up,_ he silently pleads. Not now. There could not possibly be a worse conversation for Roger to hear the moment he’s conscious, not if Mark plans on sticking to the status quo and pretending like none of this is a big deal.

“It- _nothing_ happened,” he blusters. The loft has lost it’s humid, ethereal quality in the light of day; Mark is dismayed to feel that the careless unselfconsciousness of the night before has evaporated entirely as well, leaving him small and cold inside his skin. Insecurity has returned to him like a clamp around his throat. It would be comforting to have Mimi here as a buffer this morning, if only she’d showed up _after_ he managed to get dressed (in a different pair of pants, preferably, one without a giant come stain on the front) and reestablish an… acceptable distance from Roger and his grabby, sleepy hands.

“Yeesh. No wonder you don't want anything to do with Buzzline,” Mimi says, oozing mirth. “You’re a terrible liar, Mark.”

There’s a quiet rustling that sends Mark’s anxiety spiraling. He opens his mouth to ask, despite himself, pushing at Roger’s hands again.

“So if nothing happened,” she continues obliviously. “What’s the story here?” Mark’s growing discomfort only seems to spur her on. Mimi’s like Maureen that way: she never misses an opportunity to tease the ever-loving shit out of her friends.

“Mimi,” he pleads. “Can’t we talk about this later?

She cheerfully shushes him again.

“I’m happy for you, Mark, shut up. At least answer my questions! I’m just curious!”  
 _Uh, no!_ he thinks, but she's already rambling on. “Did you two at least have a nice first date, or do you get to skip that part when you're already living together? I’ve always wondered.”

“Don’t know what you're talking about,” Roger grumbles suddenly against the back of Mark’s neck, making Mark jump nearly all the way out of his skin. “J’st helping a friend out.”

“Is that what they're calling it?” Mimi sounds like if she hears one more thing from either of them she’s going to break down sobbing with laughter. Mark resents the smugness, but he can't help but notice that their situation is a little incriminating. Roger isn't wearing pants, either, although _he_ at least has his boxers to shield him from prying eyes.

“Well I’m happy for you two, anyway,” Mimi says when neither of them is forthcoming. (She’s always had a sixth sense for when a silence is just about to cross the line into uncomfortable.) She pats Mark’s knee again, stifling a giggle at the way he jumps. “I’ve gotta run…Keep me posted, okay?”

She pauses, still facing in their direction from what Mark can tell and he gets the distinct impression that she’s giving him one of her Meaningful Looks.

“Have fun,” Mark mumbles, because he’s weak and can't stand to be cold to anyone, even if they're trying to strangle him with his own embarrassment.

“Don’t come back,” Roger snaps.

Mimi flips him off and shifts her purse back up high on her shoulder, standing again. “Love you too,” she says, blowing them each a kiss. “See you both later.”

As if that weren't enough, as she slips out the door, Mark distinctly hears her snort, “can’t say I’m surprised…”

The silence that she leaves in her wake is so horrifically uncomfortable that it motivates Mark to finish what he’d started and actually sit up.

It’s a lot easier now that Roger is awake - or it should be, but as Mark gingerly sips at the glass of water Mimi had left, Roger sits up as well. His hair is sticking up in the most ridiculous way. He eyes Mark nervously and swallows his own aspirin dry, which makes Mark wince for his throat.

“Did you take your AZT yesterday?” he asks automatically, which is perhaps not the most tactful thing he could have said.

Roger goes three shades paler. “Fuck,” he swears, and then, “You don't have any open cuts, do you?” When Mark doesn't answer within the millisecond he grabs for his shirt, which Mark only narrowly avoids by stumbling to his feet and backwards away from the couch. “Do you?!”

“Roger, it's okay!” he says loudly. He bats his hands away a second time, flushing darkly when he remembers why Roger would be looking there first. His stomach is a sticky mess of matted blond hairs.

“We didn't- um.” There's no way to phrase it that isn't ten kinds of awkward. Mark just plows right through it; his head is suddenly very light, in a very unpleasant way, and all he wants is his bed. And to forget that this ever happened. “We didn't do anything that would have.. would have required, um. Protection.”

“Are you _sure_?” Roger looks very off-kilter right now, like this was the last way he ever wanted to wake up. His eyes are wide and a little bloodshot, and his hands are twitchy and anxious, grabbing onto the edge of the coffee table and then the couch cushion, picking at the duct tape holding the side of it together.

Mark reaches deep in his chest and tries to find that solid island of calm that everyone tells him that he has. He can't freak out. Not while Roger is freaking out.

“No, it's fine. It’s… there's no chance. Don’t worry about it, Roger.”

“I’ll worry about whatever the fuck I want to worry about.” Roger seems to take a deep breath, although his composure still seems strained when he manages to speak again. “That shit was pretty heavy, huh?”

To Mark’s knowledge, they’d been up for close to ten hours, most of which they’d spent making out or mumbling nonsense while they stared at the ceiling.

Heavy does seem like the right word.

“Uh… yeah. I don’t think I’d do it again,” he mutters, shuffling his feet. “It was fun though.”

“It was,” Roger says, in that ominous tone that means he’s building up to something bigger.

Mark can feel the hairs on the back of his neck standing up the longer this conversation goes on. He makes the abrupt decision to put dealing with this off for as long as is humanly possible, even if it means walking around the city with this hangover all fucking day- which he probably _will_ have to resort to, actually, seeing as they're both off today.

 _I'm going to hell,_ he realizes with a sinking feeling. This is undoubtedly the worst thing he's ever done. The worst and the best. Because now he has to deal with the hazy memories of Roger dragging him down and kissing him, touching him, _claiming_ him -

But he _has_ them. It actually _happened_.

And now, despite his headache, he's in dire need of a cold shower.

“I’m gonna go take a shower,” he says.

Roger, in the middle of lying back like he's thinking that maybe he can still sleep it off if he’s lazy enough, stops abruptly and narrows his eyes at him accusingly.

“Are you ditching me already?” he complains. _I thought we were in this shitty hangover together_ goes unsaid.

“I have - plans,” Mark lies with as much apology as he can muster. It's not convincing, but he’s banking on Roger to feel too much like shit to call him on it right this second. “Sorry.”

“... Yeah, okay.” Roger mutters, turning away.

_It worked! Run!_

Mark bundles up all of his guilt and confusion, turns on his heel, and does just that. Maybe the way to salvage all of this will appear to him in the steam on the mirror while he showers.

  __

* * *

The next morning finds Mark slumped miserably over a ridiculously tiny table in the cafe across the street from the video store, stomach growling and pockets empty.

He wishes that he’d had the wherewithal to grab his camera before he fled the apartment. Or at least his wallet. This is the second time he's done this to himself this week.

Last night he’d waited on the street for over an hour until Roger stepped out onto the fire escape to have a cigarette, then sprinted up the stairs in time to fling himself through the door and into his bedroom where he was reasonably sure Roger wouldn’t try to ambush him. Roger was a passive aggressive like that sometimes; he'd wait for a prime opportunity, _then_ he’d pounce.

And now Mark is fucking exhausted.

He wants to give up and just go camp out at his mom’s place back in Scarsdale, where at least he wouldn’t have to worry about Roger potentially lurking around every corner wanting to talk to him “about last night.” Mark has heard Roger give that speech before - albeit probably more brusquely, considering it's always been addressed to girls whose names Roger didn't even know, and not his best friend - and he’ll do basically anything not to have to hear it directed at _him_.

He’d barely been able to sleep at all, tossing and turning and agonizing over what he was going to say when Roger finally caught him.

 _“Listen, Mark,”_ Roger would say, hands shoved deep into his pockets the way he did when he was pretending to be cool and casual. _“We can’t do that again. It's not safe and it's not fair to you… You’re just not my type.”_

What could he say to that? What was he _supposed_ to say?

_Actually, Rog, that jerk-off session we had the other night was the all-time best sex I’ve ever had - yes, including Maureen - and I’d sell my soul for a chance to do it again._

Roger would probably get a kick out of that, actually.

The cafe walls were painted bright yellow, covered in odd, textured brass decorations and large framed murals in bright primary colors and soft, broadly curving shapes. It overall gave the impression of a daycare superimposed over a particularly bubbly psychotherapist’s waiting room, at least in Mark’s opinion. The bright colors were certainly distracting, but sadly not enough to scrub the anxiety from where it's seeped into every little crevice of his neurotic brain.

Not to mention, the collar that started this whole catastrophe was right back where it started: in the pocket of his work pants, pressing subtly against his thigh.

Fuck. Just - fuck. This is just fucking awful. He can’t avoid Roger - or _this_ \- forever. They fucking live together. It’s impossible.

Mark lifts his head two inches and lets it fall back down against the tabletop.

It's going to be a long day.

 

* * *

 

The work day positively crawls by, and by the time he’s lugged his bike back up all seven flights of stairs, Mark wants nothing more than to fall into his bed and pass the fuck out.

Lady Luck appears to be smiling on him, though, because when he shoulders his way inside the sound of the pipes groaning greets him like a welcome home. Roger must be taking a shower.

 _Oh thank God_ , Mark thinks with tremendous, almost nauseating relief. _I haven't eaten since- fuck, since- when?_

He barely remembers to lock the door behind him before he’s beelining for the kitchen counter, feeling around for anything remotely edible. There’s a smear of what he can only hope is mayo on the metal edge of the sink, and a trail of crumbs leading away from it. A sandwich actually sounds fucking delicious right now, so Mark hurriedly rummages around in the fridge and the cupboards for the fixings and then dashes off to his room, sandwich in one hand and a glass of surprisingly unspoiled milk in the other.

His bed is calling to him seductively. Mark shuts the door behind him quietly - he resists the paranoid urge to shove the dresser in front of it and barricade himself in indefinitely - and sets his lunch down on the nightstand before allowing himself to collapse sideways and finally relax. He sighs as the tension drains from his body, leaving him feeling curiously hollow and… disappointed.

It's a little pathetic that he's _this_ exhausted after a six hour shift. Mark shifts uncomfortably, tugging at the rumpled comforter until he’s half cocooned in it, staring at the ceiling morosely.

 _Pathetic_.

It’s one of his favorite words. He hates that it constantly seems to apply to him.

The first bite of his sandwich tastes like absolutely nothing in the face of his renewed existential crisis.

Mark sets it back down and rubs his hands over his face, sighing deeply again.

With the muffled sound of the water pelting the porcelain in the next room to lull him, and the added lethargy brought on by his sudden re-realization that he’s a deplorable failure as a friend (and generally as a human being), Mark _almost_ falls asleep without bothering to finish his meal. He’s not hungry now. He feels sick, and tired, and sorry for himself, and Collins and Angel are both still missing. There’s no one to turn to: Mimi is obviously not going to take this seriously, and Maureen would be just as bad, if not worse. He hopes to God that she hasn't heard a word about it yet, actually, but the odds are slim that she won’t have gotten wind by the end of the week.

 _Maybe Joanne will let me mope at her if I bring wine_ , he thinks sleepily. He might be able to scrape together enough to buy a small bottle of that Sutter Home stuff that she was so partial to… Although, knowing Joanne, she’d probably be just as happy with a box of frozen mozzarella sticks. Or nothing, even, as long as he didn’t snot all over her throw pillows again.

Joanne is such a good friend. Mark doesn't know what he’s done to deserve her endless sympathy.

He’s starting to drift off, grateful that for once the sound of Roger in the shower isn't conjuring filthy mental images designed to tempt him, when he remembers his half-hearted resolution from two days ago to come up with a plot for his next project. His next screenplay. Which is supposed to keep him distracted from all of _this_.

 _Too late for that_ , he thinks.

Every inch of him is already screaming in protest, but suddenly he can't get it out of his head. It's going to bother him if he doesn't get up and put something on paper. He needs something to show for the day, doesn't he? There’s nothing new to use on his film reel, as he’d forgotten his camera on the way to work… and he hadn't so much as scribbled a few bullets on a post-it note while he was standing around all day at the shop reading the blurbs on the backs of the VHS cases in a desperate attempt to find a solution to this.

Mark sits up reluctantly and twists around to fish in the drawer of his nightstand for a piece of paper and pen. He takes a deep breath and holds it for a long moment, then lets it out to a count of seven.

Brainstorming is often his favorite part of the process, once he gets into it. The sound of the shower fades in the background as he narrows his focus. Mark hasn't tried to write a screenplay since the epic failure of the _last_ attempt, which he’d mostly written in a desperate attempt to impress Maureen into falling back into bed with him; still, lingering embarrassment aside, Mark likes this at least as much as he enjoys documentary filmmaking, and he’s soon engrossed in his scribbling. The nice thing about fiction was that he could just project all of his own ridiculous problems onto the characters, and either examine them from a safe, detached distance while he pulled the strings with every stroke of his pen - which he doesn't really have the heart to do right now, not just yet - _or_ , almost as satisfying, ignore them completely.

Option two is doing him wonders. Mark reaches over to give his sandwich another go, sitting crosslegged with a page full of all potentially terrible premises in his lap.

The bedroom door swings open and slams shut, so fast that Mark barely has time to scramble up and out of the way before Roger is launching himself onto his bed, still flushed and damp from the shower.

“What happened to knocking?” Mark squeaks. His heart is hammering and he realizes with growing dismay that all of his literary ambition has fluttered straight to the floor alongside his meager notes.

“Psh. We don't have privacy here.” Roger waves a hand flippantly, smiling awkwardly. He’s making a point to make Mark’s eyes, which makes the whole thing feel even more stinted.

That's strange. Roger isn't usually one to beat around the bush when he wants something, and Mark can only assume that he does, based on that entrance.

The pause is just long enough for a spark of real anxiety to flare up in Roger’s eyes. “... I’m just kidding, Mark. I can leave if you’re busy… or… want to be alone.”

Demure, considerate Roger is not a Roger that Mark has ever bothered to imagine, nor is it one that he's ever wanted to meet. He stares his friend with growing concern.

“Um- no, it's fine. Really. What's wrong with you?”

It takes him a moment to realize that that might be taken the wrong way, and then he's spluttering, waving his hands around wildly in an attempt to negate it before Roger can close himself off and leave. “I mean! I mean, not, that there's anything wrong, I mean- with- I appreciate it! I just don't…”

Mark trails off faintly, trying to decipher Roger’s expression. He’s wrinkling his nose ambiguously. “Understand,” he finishes after a moment of floundering.

He does understand, but he doesn't want to. He wants to keep pretending that everything is going to just go back to normal.

Roger isn't being cooperative, though.

 _Unsurprising_.

“Well,” Roger says, looking swiftly down and picking around one of his cuticles. “Funny you should say that… I thought maybe we should talk about a few things.”

“Things,” Mark echoes incredulously.

 _Things_ like the sticky pair of boxer shorts stuffed down deep in the pile of laundry he has going by the door? _Things_ like how making out on the couch all night while you're high doesn't have to mean anything?

 _Things_. Like how Roger is trying to fucking torture him. Clearly.

_Here it comes._

Mark so, so doesn't have it in him to listen to Roger tell him in the most awkward, drawn out, pitying way possible that there’s no possible way that they're going to get a civil union and spend the rest of their poverty-stricken lives together having wild, drug-induced sex on the couch. He tries to head it off before it can even start.

“Listen, Roger, I don't really-”

“You really liked it when I talked, right?” Roger blurts. He’s got the corner of Mark’s sheet tangled between his fingers, flexing them spastically. “You’re into that.”

Mark winces. _No, fuck no, we’re not having this conversation_. “You’re… talking right now, Roger,” he tries lamely.

Roger gives him a withering look. “You know what I mean.”

Mark does know what he means, but he’s already got his script worked out, dammit! Roger is so far off if he's in another play entirely. A completely different genre.

Worst of all, hope is creeping insidiously back into his chest like a dastardly parasite intent on ruining him.

Fucking Roger. Fucking Mimi and her insinuations. Fucking… Collins and his hallucinogenic sex drugs!

“Well… you’ve got a filthy fucking mouth on you,” Mark finally says, trying to keep the tone light. Like this is all a joke. “Not that I didn't know that, but.. wow.”

“True. But that doesn't answer my question.”

“Does it matter?” Roger is staring at him intently. It's starting to give Mark heart palpitations, despite his resolve not to so much as _think_ about Roger that way ever again.

He’s doing his best not to get ahead of himself, he is. But it's really fucking hard when there’s a hand creeping up his thigh from his knee.

“I- I know that it was just a fluke, Rog.” Mark clears his throat and ignores the wily hand with everything he has, biting his lip and hoping that his cock won't give him away. “We don’t even have to talk about it. Everyone does stupid shit when they’re high, right?” He will not - _will not!_ \- let himself believe that Roger wants a repeat. That can’t be it; he’s just trying to get him going, and it's _working_. Mark’s half-hard already, which, he thinks, brings him riiiiiight back to _pathetic_.

“Let’s just forget it ever happened,” Mark says, voice wavering and nearly breaking as heat floods through his body and rushes toward his groin.

As with most attempts that Mark has ever made to take control of a situation, this one is a miserable failure. Roger rubs the heel of his palm deliberately up over his growing erection, and Mark can't help but moan.

“What if I don't want to _forget it?_ " He sounds completely incredulous, it's throwing Mark for a loop, the way his voice is climbing. He rubs back down, then up again, curving his palm to cup the shape of Mark’s cock just so. “Are you fucking kidding me? I smacked your ass until you _came in my lap_.”

Mark could probably come right now just listening to Roger say that.

“Sorry,” Mark says, because it seems like the only thing he can say right now with Roger pressing him slowly back into the mattress, palm still smoothing up and down his hard on through his pants. His heart is pounding. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I won’t do it again!”

“You’re right,” Roger says pleasantly. His hand abandons Mark’s straining cock momentarily - a whimper of protest is torn desperately from Mark’s throat - to brush over the shape of the collar in his pocket. A reminder. “Because from now on you're going to come wherever, whenever, and _however_ I tell you to.”

“Okay,” Mark breathes. “Fuck, _okay_.”

The bedroom is starting to feel stifling. Mark is pretty sure that it's only partly to do with the trail of shower-steam that Roger’s dragged in behind him, and more to do with the sexual tension that’s rapidly building to an excruciating peak in the space between them, which is getting smaller and smaller. In the light of day, without anything circulating his bloodstream and making him woozy and agreeable, this is _terrifying_.

Roger pins his shoulders down with one hand, toying with Mark’s zipper with the other. He leans down and presses his mouth to his ear.

“You’re so fucking hot like this, you know that, Mark?” he breathes, dragging it down tooth by tooth until Mark can’t help but arch his hips up. He can't entirely believe this is happening but he knows better than to question it when Roger’s skimming his thumbnail along the outline of his erection through the fabric, just barely skimming it, making it throb. “Bet I could make you come just like that again… make you beg for it and come all over yourself without ever even really touching you.”

“Please don’t,” Mark whimpers. He should put a stop to this. Roger must be out of his mind if he thinks Mark is hot, ever, in any capacity.

“Hush.” Roger smacks his thigh none-too-gently, making his hips jolt again. Mark bites down on his lip to keep from gasping and sounding completely, humiliatingly desperate.

But he is. He is, he's so fucking desperate, and his whole body feels flushed and hot and alive as Roger nips his earlobe and minutely increases the pressure of his rubbing, teasing hand.

“We’re just getting started,” Roger says, and Mark realizes that his voice has dropped past that smooth-honey-danger tone and directly into _holy shit, Roger Davis is going to fuck me_ roughness, which is enough to make his head spin. “You know what I was thinking about in the shower? With my hand around my dick?”

Mark’s cock throbs eagerly in his pants at the thought, leaking a noticeable damp spot beneath Roger’s hand. He shakes his head, panting. “N-no.”

The first brush of Roger’s fingers against him through the thin material of his boxers nearly makes him come on the spot. Mark throws an arm over his eyes and exhales shakily, trying to force himself calm while Roger, clearly enjoying his torment, murmurs, “I was thinking about teasing your pretty cock until you couldn't see straight.” He curls his hand around Mark’s weeping cock and gives it an agonizingly slow pump, and Mark can't help the whimper that escapes this time. “Rub my thumb under the tip, like that… mmm… til you were squirming for it. Til you were so fucking desperate you could hardly move without coming all over my hand. Til you _begged_ me to let you…” He stops abruptly, and Mark, already so worked up he could cry, groans and claws at the sheets. “Want me to keep going?”

Mark blinks his eyes open and shudders at the dark, heavy way that Roger is staring at him, like he actually means every filthy word that's streaming out of his mouth. He can feel his thighs trembling, muscles tensed in anticipation. “W-what?”

“Do you want me to keep going?” Roger repeats. His hand is still wrapped around Mark’s hardness, the perfect amount of pressure, _fuck, so fucking good_ , but he's not moving anymore and Mark’s breath is starting to come in little hiccups of desperation.

There's plenty of good reasons that he should say no. Mark just can't remember any right now, but he _knows_ that they exist. Somewhere. Probably. There's a lot of perfectly good reasons that he should sit up, tell Roger to cut it out, and go out there to the living room with him and have a cup of tea or something h, and not sexy, where they'll both be safely clothed and- and- and strictly platonic.

 _Have we_ ever _been strictly platonic_? he suddenly wonders.

“Mark,” Roger murmurs expectantly when the silence stretches on, voice dropping somehow lower.

 _Fuck_. Roger is _not_ allowed to say his name like that. Mark can't survive the humiliation of coming in his pants twice in the same week.

His predatory gaze is trailing up and down Mark’s body leisurely, tongue flashing out to lick his lower lip when he reaches Mark’s cock in his hand. He gives it another slow, deliberate squeeze, watching his face with those dark eyes, pupils blown wide with arousal.

 _I want you to fuck me_ , he wants to moan, wants to beg. His fingers tighten in the sheets. _Please, fuck, Roger, I’ve been thinking about it for fucking months, please -_

Steeling himself for the letdown, Mark bites his lip - unable to trust his voice - and nods.

“Use your words.” Roger smacks him on the thigh again, harder this time, so that he can faintly feel the sting even through the denim.

“I like it,” he gasps, releasing the sheets and grabbing blindly onto Roger’s bare shoulders. “Keep going, keep - _fuck._ ”

Roger’s face splits into a wide, wicked grin.

“Oh, I will,” he purrs, clambering up onto his hands and knees to crawl practically into Mark’s lap. It’s strangely reminiscent of their tumble on the couch, except this time Mark is sober enough to feel his anxiety climbing his throat, and to notice the warm weight of Roger’s balls pressing gently against his thigh through the fabric of his boxers, alarmingly close to his own throbbing, neglected cock.

The first press of Roger’s lips to his neck, just beneath his ear, sets his thighs to trembling again. He feels Roger smirk, the sudden warm wet of his tongue flicking out, and can't keep his hand from shooting down towards his cock trapped hard and aching between them.

Roger knocks his hand away, replaces it with his own. His thumb begins the agonizing process of circling around and around the sticky-sensitive head of it, making Mark whine shakily. “Roger…”

“You wanted me to keep talking, Cohen, so shut up.” Roger’s tongue is drawing hot, aimless patterns down the column of Mark’s neck, behind his jaw, along his throat. Each word is a warm exhalation over the cooking saliva, which sets Mark’s nervous system practically on fire.

Mark clamps his mouth shut resolutely.

Roger bites lightly on his pulse point, and he flails. “I’ve wanted to grab you and drag you to bed for so long,” he murmurs, almost a growl. “Wanted to mark up all this pretty.. pale… skin.”

He latches his teeth over Mark’s threat again and _sucks_ , and Mark’s cock gives a decidedly pleased jerk in his palm, drawing a moan out of him that’s half a sob. He clings to Roger’s shoulders, scared to touch him more and incriminate himself, irrationally frightened that this is all a fucking joke. He’s so fucking hard, _God, Roger, please just-_

Roger releases the skin with a wet pop, laving his tongue over it proudly. “You’re all mine now, Mark, so get used to it. I’m going to do everything to you. Make you want it so bad you shake. I’m gonna tie you up and lick your whole fucking body until I know exactly what makes you tick, and I’m gonna make you fucking _scream_ before I let you come.” His hand is suddenly tight around Mark’s cock again, fisting it with firm, quick strokes that make his knees weak. His breath is coming short and uneven. _Fuck, please please PLEASE_ , he thinks desperately. Roger rubs his thumb encouragingly up from the base of him, as if willing him closer to the edge. Demanding it.

“You thought you could avoid me,” Roger says hotly, his mouth back at the shell of Mark’s ear. Mark shakes his head weakly. Roger chuckles. “Yes, you did. You thought that I was done tormenting you.”

Mark wants Roger to torment him forever. He wants to fucking _come_.

“Jesus. I’m so hard right now,” Roger sighs, and _that_ right there is enough to bring Mark to the edge. He can feel it now, Roger’s cock resting hard and heavy right there against his leg, rocking just slightly. He wants Roger to tear his pants off and spread his legs apart and shove it in him, he wants Roger to open him up with his cock, he -

“Fuck, so close aren’t you Mark,” Roger groans in his ear, and Mark finds himself nodding, choking on the accompanying whimper. He’s so, so, so fucking close, can’t believe this is happening, can’t believe Roger is-

“So close for me,” Roger says. _Yes, yes, yes._ “I want you to come so hard you black out.” His hand speeds up, so fast Mark can’t breathe between the strokes, can't breathe at all. “Come for me, Mark.”

Mark fists his fingers in Roger’s hair and tugs, coming with a strangled moan.

 _Oops_ , he thinks faintly as Roger presses his nose into his neck and shoves his hand into his own pants, bringing himself off in just a handful of rough tugs.

Roger’s not going to let this go, is he.


	4. day 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> day 3 prompts: biting and public

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aha! Success! I actually managed to keep this one sort of short! I love this chapter, it's a personal favorite of mine. I hope you all enjoy it too. (If you're wondering, it's my personal headcanon that Mark's dad is Jewish and his mom isn't. Hence why she would call him on Christmas. Mark grew up celebrating both Christmas AND Chanukah, til his parents divorced.)

The video store is not quite Mark’s happy place, but it's close enough.

The work is simple and familiar. Mark had volunteered at his local library as a teenager, and it was pretty much the same: sorting, shelving, checking the cases for “blemishes”. At the library that had usually just meant looking for greasy food stains or marker vandalism… here, the stains were a little more unpleasant to clean up, but Mark had cleaned plenty of public bathrooms so he isn’t all that fazed. It's… tolerable. Mark doesn't _love_ this job, obviously, but he doesn't hate it either. Not as much as he’s hated some of his previous jobs.

So yeah, as careers go it isn't glamorous - he can't say he's ever aspired to be renting porn to weird, twitchy, shifty-looking strangers with probable sex addictions - but hey! It's money. And one of the very first things Mark had discovered when he moved here was that when you're ridiculously broke (and all of your friends are poor, too), the promise of money makes just about anything excusable.

When it came down to it, Mark would rather scramble to make up a different, more appropriate job to tell his mother about this Christmas than make ten cents less to the hour at the high-maintenance coffee shop that he worked at before this.

This place is much more relaxed, which is right up Mark’s alley. That’s why he’d volunteered at the library in the first place. He sort of enjoys the atmosphere, despite the unnerving rows of tapes with big, bold-lettered titles like “Ass Ventura, Crack Detective” and “Semen Demons 2” staring at him from the shelf directly across from the checkout desk. Mark is accustomed to vulgarity. He revels in it. Growing up with an overbearing, invasive mother had made him so sexually repressed that he’d spent practically his entire first semester of college looking desperately for opportunities to lock himself in his dorm and jerk off for hours.

(Which is probably something that he has in common with most of the people who frequent this shop, now that he thinks about it.

 _Ew_.)

Most importantly, though, work has become a sanctuary from the psycho-sexual turmoil that Roger has been putting him through this week.

Mark doesn't know what happened. He’d had such good intentions. He was going to stuff down his elation and pretend it never happened. For Roger. To _save_ their friendship! Mark thinks he's a pretty fucking great friend if he’s willing to give up what could be the fulfillment of every wet dream he's had for years for the sake of not rocking the boat!

Roger doesn't seem to give a rat’s ass about any of that, though. He just keeps on dragging Mark back to bed.

 _Six times_ , Mark thinks to himself dreamily. _I’ve gotten off with Roger six. Times._

 

 

It's still extremely possible - probable - that Roger is just rebounding. Mark is fully invested in that theory, as it's the only thing that's keeping his head above water every time Roger propositions him. Well. Keeps him from getting too presumptuous, anyway. After all, if Roger is _asking_ for it then it's probably okay if Mark lets it happen, right? As long as he doesn't get any untoward ideas about what it means for them as friends.

Just because Roger keeps saying all that shit about how Mark is his, and how he gets off thinking about him… that doesn't actually _mean_ anything.

Nothing _anyone_ says in the middle of sex means anything outside of the bedroom. Not according to Maureen, and not according to Mark’s short-lived college boyfriend, who had wasted no time hooking up with Mark’s bunkmate after breaking Mark’s poor little freshman heart.

So when Roger licks into his mouth and says shit like “ _so hard to keep my hands off of you_ ”, it doesn't actually means that he spends any amount of time _looking_ at Mark when he's not horny enough to make a pass at him.

Of course it doesn't.

Mark feels ridiculous every time his heart starts to race at the thought.

He sits on the floor with a pile of tapes and starts combing through the shelves in front of him, searching for alphabetical mistakes. It’s quiet, monotonous work. The type of work that Mark usually loves, because it gives him plenty of time to daydream about where he’s going to try and get some filming in after work, or what he can afford to get each of his friends for the next holiday. Customer interruptions usually spaced apart by twenty minutes are so, which Mark thinks is absolutely _perfect_ : it’s just long enough to appease his social anxiety, and just short enough to keep him from overthinking anything and inevitably giving himself an anxiety attack.

Mark is really sort of picky about his jobs. That's probably why he's had so many.

Hardly anyone ever comes in before five p.m., though, and today is his dreaded day shift. By two, Mark is bored out of his fucking skull.

Because he just can't help himself, Mark’s thoughts circle right back to Roger. And tacked onto that thought is a boner waiting to happen.

God, he hates it when he gets hard in the porn shop. It feels so sleazy.

It's hard to think about Roger _without_ getting hard, though. He’s a walking innuendo. He keeps leaving hickies all over Mark’s neck while Mark is kissed out and unable to protest; they ache when he presses his fingers to them. (Naturally, Mark spends most of the day poking and prodding at them while he’s doing other things.) Collins and Angel are back in town and the two of them have been sneaking around like fucking teenagers trying to get off under their parents’ noses. Mark always tripping along after Roger reluctantly, like he's scared of getting caught. Mark is relatively certain that Collins already knows - of course he does, Collins always knows fucking everything that goes on with any of them, sometimes before they do - but Roger seems like he's having so much fun showing off all of his high school sneaking skills that Mark just hasn't had the heart to tell him.

But the truth… the real, pathetic truth… is that he's just scared of what this is going to do to his head.

He’s scared that it might ruin everything.

It’s not Roger’s fault that Mark is so fucking obsessive and confused and can't tell his head from his ass romantically. He’s usually pretty good at keeping his sexual fantasies separate from reality, not least because he's yet to meet someone as unbearably attracted to him as he is to them. It's just Roger that's tripping him up. Roger’s a special case. Roger, who he’s lived with for what feels like half his life. Roger, who he's seen throw up too many times to count, who's hair he's bleached even though he can't stand the smell, who knows his Chinese takeout order and is always willing to make the call when Mark has too much anxiety to even think about using the phone.

There’s no doubt in Mark’s mind that this is going to end up being a really fucking bad idea.

But now that he's given in once - _six times_ \- he can't stop thinking about it. And he can't just give it up.

The shop is particularly dead today. Mark can feel himself getting trapped in a toxic thought cycle and, remembering the stroke of brilliance that had lead him to shove his notes into his satchel that morning before work, he decides to seize the day and try and get some work done. He can't keep thinking about Roger and his piercings and his tattoos and his mouth hot and wet on his throat if he’s knee deep in character development charts, right?

He circles back around the desk and reaches down to stick his hand into his bag, fishing for the loose pages he already has. When he slaps them down on the countertop they look… pitifully empty. He realizes abruptly that all he's really done so far is pick out a few seemingly random names and a setting.

 _What the fuck_ , Mark thinks, offended with himself. He could have _sworn_ he’d gotten further than this… He deflates a little.

_This is why I never write._

But right now is the perfect opportunity. The bell on the door remains still and silent, no customers in sight.

Mark picks up a pen and makes a handful of bullet points, spaced several lines apart, writing each characters’ name beside one. He’s written exactly one defining characteristic beside each of them when the bell suddenly jingles, and then he's scrambling to stuff his papers beneath the desk again, a hot flush creeping up his neck into his face. “Um, hello! Welc- oh.”

“Oh,” Roger mocks, striding right up to the desk and leaning over it to dangle a brown paper sack in Mark’s face. It smells like food; he snatches it out of the air, already salivating. “Hey to you too, four eyes. Thought I’d swing by and just make sure you weren't starving.”

“Jackass,” Mark says fondly. He unrolls the top of the bag and peeks inside, bemused. “Did you go out and buy bags for this?”

“No.” Roger’s ears have gone suspiciously red. “Found them in the cupboard.”

Mark doesn't even care that he's being lied to, gasping, “Oh my God, I love you,” as he tears the side of the bag halfway down in his excitement to get at the sandwich.

It’s an honest to god, beautiful, perfect homemade _sandwich_ with what looks like honey mustard and turkey and even tomatoes, which he knows Roger thinks are disgusting.

Mark had no idea how hungry he was. He takes a huge bite and, while he's occupied with chewing - savoring every moment of it, too, still slightly awed by the fact that Roger clearly took the time to go to the grocery store and then _make_ all of this for him - Roger twists around and takes a good look at the shop. He’s only dropped by once before, mostly for the laugh.

“Is it always like this?” He gives a vague, sweeping gesture to the store at large.

“A ghost town? Yeah.” Mark swallows and reluctantly puts his sandwich down, glancing guiltily at the door. “Mostly. Til it starts getting dark, anyway. Then all of the freaks come out of hiding.”

Roger gives him a heated, amused look that makes the hairs on his arms stand up.

“So it's just you and the porn all day long. Sounds like your dream job.”

“Oh yeah,” Mark deadpans. He’s trying to figure out how to get the sandwich back in the bag when he’s already mangled the poor thing, but it's just not happening. “You know me. Always taking care of business while I admire the view of the street.”

As if to illustrate his point, a haggard woman pushing a double stroller and dragging her a toddler along behind her passes by. The kid stares up at the neon sign on the door, mouth an “O” of excitement.

Roger rolls his eyes.

“Oh please, like anyone passing by would even _notice_. The windows are tinted!”

“People still could walk _in,_ Roger.”

“Yeah, well, people could still walk into your _bedroom_ , but that doesn't stop you from beating off in the middle of the day-”

“You have _no proof_.”

“- with three other people walking around-”

“I haven't jerked off once this week!”

Roger’s lips curl up smugly for a moment at that. “Yeah right, you fucking exhibitionist,” he says. “You probably like it when you know someone could be listening.”

Mark can't really argue with that.

Satisfied that he's won, Roger smirks and reaches up to flick a hair out of his eyes. He’s wearing liner for the first time in a while, which always makes his eyes seem dark and sultry no matter what his expression. His shirt and his jeans are both dark as well, under the well-worn leather jacket that he’s had since before Mark even knew him. It’s jarring to see him like this, like the _Well Hungarians_ version of Roger Davis has been temporarily resurrected. The effect on Mark’s libido is devastating, to say the least.

“Thanks for the sandwich,” Mark says. He ducks his head and smiles down at the bag awkwardly.

Unlike with Mimi, or Angel, or even Maureen - and she and Mark had fucked around with each other on and off for four _years_ \- Mark doesn't know how to let Roger knows that he looks nice without potentially stumbling over the fact that they’re - what? sleeping together? getting off together? neither feels right, but Mark doesn't know what to call it exactly - and so he doesn't mention it at all.

But he wants to. He really, really wants to. Because Roger hasn't worn those jeans in at least two years, and Mark would really love more opportunities to appreciate the way that they hug his thighs.

“No problem.” Roger smiles warmly for a moment, which quickly turns mischievous. “Least I could do, considering it's probably my fault you didn't make one yourself this morning.”

This morning Mark had woken up to Roger’s thumb tracing the outline of his morning wood through his boxers. He’d hit the snooze about five times afterward.

His face feels hot again. They’ve never spoken about anything they’ve done in the privacy of the apartment outside of it. It feels slightly unreal, almost embarrassing to hear it out loud and fully clothed in the real world. “It was still nice of you.”

“Mmhm.” Roger takes a few idle steps toward the far wall, squinting at some of the titles incredulously. “When do you go on lunch? Now?”

Despite the fact that Mark has spent most of the past week finding ways to avoid thinking about Roger when they're apart, once Roger is actually in a room with him he always sort of forgets why. There’s no awkwardness between them. It's fucking weird. There _should_ be awkwardness, considering how bizarre their entire arrangement is, but years of cohabitation have given them a free pass. There’s nothing weird about waking up with Roger’s limbs tangled around him, because they’d already slept in the same bed plenty of times. Seen each other naked? Check. Flirted? Well, Roger used to flirt with practically everyone who made eye contact with him, so… yeah.

The only real difference is that now sometimes the flirting actually _leads_ somewhere. They'll snark and wrestle and complain at each other about their work days, and then suddenly Roger will be backing him up into a wall.

“I was going to wait until three,” Mark says, frowning.

Now that Roger is _here_ , Mark really doesn't want him to leave. He’s inconsistent like that.

He’s also starting to chafe in his work pants.

_Damn it, not here._

“Take off early,” Roger suggests, sounding far too casual. Mark looks back to him in time to see him glancing over his neck critically. “No one will know.”

Mark looks down at the disorganized pile of paper beneath the desk, and the bag lunch waiting to be eaten. He _is_ pretty hungry… and horny.

And Roger’s giving him that _look_.

“Technically,” he says nervously, unable to shake the feeling that he’s already doing something horribly wrong. “I’m not supposed to have any civilians in the store when the Closed sign is up. John will fucking murder me if he finds out.”

“Ooh, I’m a _civilian_ ,” Roger snorts. “Your boss isn’t going to find out, how the fuck would he even find out?”

“Roger…”

“Put the damn sign up, Mark.”

When Roger's voice drops like that, Mark does what he's told. This has been firmly established, and apparently, _at work_ is still no exception. He glances nervously around the store one more time, unsure of if he's looking for an excuse to get out of this or an excuse to do it.

“Give me one good reason that I should risk getting fired,” Mark says slowly. Roger’s eyes on his neck are starting to burn, and his skin is prickling uncomfortably warmly. He’s already imagining how Roger’s hand will press flat against his stomach before dragging down to his belt and yanking it open-

“I brought you lunch,” Roger says, yawning dramatically and leaning one hand on the checkout desks.

Mark frowns. Roger chews his lip. “I… _made_  you lunch?”

“Something _else_.”

“Because.” Roger pauses, peering at the door pointedly. With a huff, Mark strides over and flips the sign, turning the lock in the same motion. He cocks an eyebrow for Roger to continue.

Like he’s flipped a switch, Roger’s smile widens and turns predatory. “Your neck needs redecorating,” he purrs, and before Mark knows it Roger’s got two hands fisted in the front of his shirt and he’s hauling him closer to sink his teeth into his neck.

“Mother _fuck,_ ” Mark groans, squeezing his eyes shut against the sudden prick of tears. It fucking _hurts_ , but God, his cock is already throbbing in approval.

Roger ignores it and skims his fingers over Mark’s left nipple, humming around his neck.

The other weird thing about their arrangement is that now that they've done it a few times, Mark has gotten a feel for exactly how it goes. They’ve pretty much stuck to the simple stuff - all very, very pleasant stuff, he’s definitely not complaining - so it just seems natural to reach up and grab onto Roger’s shoulders like a lifeline, arching into him like he's done half a dozen times now. “Nnh..”

Roger sucks at the spot on the side of his neck for another long moment, one of his hands sliding down Mark’s back and into his back pocket so that he can grab a firm hold of his ass. Mark squeaks, struggling not to toss his head and shake him off. Roger knows exactly how to play this game, test his limits - Mark’s never thought of himself as someone who can tolerate pain (though the concept of it gets him pretty hot), but Roger has the uncanny ability to ramp it up at exactly the right pace so that it feels more... increasingly tingly than truly agonizing.

Besides, only this first one is really for the purpose of marking. When Roger pulls back to examine it, he makes a satisfied noise and leans back down to latch his mouth over his favorite spot just beneath Mark’s adam's apple. Mark tips his head to the side and struggles to control his breathing, mentally surging three steps ahead.

Next, he thinks, Roger’s going to suck a line of red marks up the side of his neck and down the other while his hands creep up inside Mark’s shirt.

When he’s done teasing him he’ll shove a thigh between his legs and back him into the desk.

Then, he’ll undo Mark’s belt in three quick pulls that Mark could never pull off in a million years, and then-

“I was thinking about this all day. I wanna try something, okay?” Roger breathes against his ear, crowding up closer so Mark can feel his erection trapped between them. _Fuck, those jeans._  Mark wants to peel him out of them and sit on his dick right here. He bites on his lip and nods frantically.

_Anything, anything, please just touch me-_

Roger gives his nipple another cursory pinch and then sinks to his knees in one fluid motion to mouth at the front of his pants, tongue pressing damp against his cock.

Mark’s knuckles go white around his shoulders. _Oh my God._ “Um-” he manages, as in _um, are you sure, do you really want to_ , but that's as far as he gets because Collins had taught him never to look a gift horse in the mouth, and because Roger is yanking his belt and then his pants open with impatient fervor and pulling his cock out of his pants.

Mark is embarrassingly hard. Flushed and fucking dripping in Roger’s hand. For a crazy moment he feels compelled to apologize for it, but the only sounds prepared to come out of his throat right now are helpless moans, one of which is all but ripped out of him as Roger glances up at him - grinning wickedly beneath those dark lashes - and darts his tongue out to lick the head of Mark’s cock.

 _I’m not going to have any wet dreams left_ , Mark thinks faintly as his knees practically give out at the hot tingle of pleasure the jolts through his gut. _This is it, this is how I die._

His fingers have somehow threaded themselves into Roger’s unruly, perfect hair and this time Roger doesn't slap his hand away.

In fact, he leans in, lips parting - _fuck, his lower lip, God he’s fucking gorgeous, where’s my camera -_ as he takes Mark’s cock into that hot, wet, beautiful mouth inch by leisurely fucking inch. Mark whimpers, wanting to squeeze his eyes shut, wanting to never ever take his eyes off of Roger hollowing his cheeks slightly to suck him off.

The slight, smooth bump of Roger’s tongue ring against the underside of his cock is almost too much.

“We shouldn't be doing this here,” Mark tries to say, but it comes out more like, “OhGodfuckRogerpleasemorepleaseyes,” and Roger makes a noise of agreement and starts bobbing his head.

Mark does have to shut his eyes. He's going to come so fucking soon, he can't help it. He can feel his balls drawing up heavy and aching towards his body.

Anyone could peer in through the door right now and see them. Hell, the boss might even have security cameras somewhere around here. Mark’s pulse jumps at the thought that they could be being watched, even if the chance is slim.

Damn Roger for being right about him. _Again._

Roger buries his nose in Mark’s crotch, briefly, and his throat spasms _tight-tight-tight!!_ around the head of Mark’s tortured cock in quick succession.

“Oh, fuck,” Mark just about sobs, and this time it comes out like “Close- close- ah-ah-ah- _hhhhh_ -”

Roger’s painted nails are skimming lightly up and down his inner thighs. As if reading Mark’s mind, he reaches between his legs and into his boxers to playfully palm his balls, giving them a stroke with his thumb.

Mark comes abruptly in his mouth.

His knees give out in almost exactly the same moment, but Roger, who has apparently done this before or else is just unfairly naturally talented at it, wraps an arm around him to keep him steady, sucking against each pulse of his cock until he’s done.

“Sorry,” Mark gasps. “Fuck. Sorry.” He blinks his eyes open, thighs still trembling, breath still coming exclusively in shaky pants. Roger stands up and dusts off his knees, still holding Mark up, and licks his lips smugly.

“I have to go get my shit for work,” he says, tipping his head toward the clock above the door. Now _he_ looks apologetic, which really doesn't make any fucking sense in Mark’s head. Who apologizes right after giving someone fucking amazing head? “I’ll see you later?”

“Yeah,” Mark agrees, because he hasn't quite regained the capacity to utter more than one-syllable words. He gives Roger the most sickeningly adoring smile he can muster, like the ones he can remember constantly giving him the first month after they’d started to get along. Back when Roger was a fucking hero in his eyes, and Mark was his biggest fan, always in the front row with his camera and his jaw slack.

The rest of the day after Roger leaves is painfully dull. Mark can't focus on anything, and the screenplay remains woefully underdeveloped.

He presses his fingers to his neck absently, enjoying the throb.

His replacement, Joe, whistles when he sees him. “Your girlfriend must be wild,” he says enviously.

“I don’t have a girlfriend.” Mark smiles tightly, lifting his bag onto his shoulder and bolting out the door.


	5. day 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> day 4 prompt: begging

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> IT'S BEEN SO LONG I'M SO SORRY. For anyone who read the conversation in the comments, yes I got evicted, yes I am okay, my boyfriend and I now live in a new, better, wonderful house and have adopted a second cat together, and everything is great. 2017 was awful in the sense that we moved twice in the space of four months and were... extremely broke. I would have picked this fic up soon after moving had my cat not gotten sick. Excuses, excuses... But here I am!   
> Lots of anxious!Mark in this chapter, sorry not sorry. I hope you guys are all still reading and enjoy. Leave a comment and tell me what you think! This fic is entirely plotted out already, but if you have suggestions or something that you particularly want to see, I might be able to fit it in if I think it's manageable.

By the time he’s elbow-deep in his satchel, searching desperately for his bike chain as the sweat slowly saturates his t-shirt outward from the already-sopping oval between his shoulder blades, Mark is half-convinced that Roger chose to apply at a bar halfway across Brooklyn just to spite him. Or at least inconvenience him.

It’s unseasonably hot. Unreasonably hot. Every year, the lot of them sit around the loft sweating in the middle of the day and complain that they’re going to move somewhere _mild,_ somewhere not New York, as if any of them could ever leave.

But Mark is small, and pale, and he doesn’t normally mind the heat, really.

Really.

_Ha._

He certainly fucking minds the heat _now._ Biking halfway across the damn city will do that to you. Unfortunately, his options had been this, or stay home and be teased within an inch of his life about the huge purple splotches crawling out from beneath his collar and up his neck.

Collins is _merciless_. In a tragically hilarious parody of when he’d first moved Mark into the loft in the first place, he’s taken to showing up in the early morning with a box of doughnuts and announcing himself boomingly, cheerful and smug, while the two of them scramble for their clothes in half-conscious panic at the slow sound of his footsteps in the hall leading to their bedroom. (It’s funny how Mark has started thinking of his bedroom as _theirs,_ as if Roger has already become a permanent fixture after just a few weeks of waking to find his roommate passed out and drooling in his hair, Mark’s come still flaking on the sheets between them.) Mark is still convinced that, regardless of all of the pillow-biting that’s been going on in his bedroom recently, Collins somehow just _knows_ every detail of his recent tumbles with his roommate, a suspicion which isn’t helped by Roger’s apparently insatiable urge to hear him make noises more humiliating than he knew himself capable of making.

(Mark maintains that it’s horrible bedroom etiquette to take the gag back _out_ of your partners’ mouth without warning, but it’s a moot point anyway. The look on Roger’s face when he’s choking out senseless pleas for him to just let him _come already, Roger, oh fuck,_ makes it… more than worth it.)

They haven’t been caught. Yet. But the possibility is always so close at hand that Mark thinks he’s going to have a fucking aneurysm out of sheer embarrassment.

So, Collins had taken to watching both of them like a gossipy hawk, no doubt five seconds away from phoning Maureen the second he caught scent of anything incriminating on either of them. Roger was _not_ as subtle as he obviously thought. And Mark…

Well, to be honest, Mark has been dying for an excuse to do this ever since _that incident_.

Popping in for a visit to pay Roger back for his… _surprise_ the week before had seemed much cooler (and sexier) in his head. Of course it had. _Everything_ that Mark does seems suave in his head, right up until he actually does it and realizes too late that he’s still the same socially incompetent nerd that he was the day before. And the day before that. And the day before that... Mark’s imagination has been torn between simultaneously horrific yet slightly, shamefully arousing scenes where Collins, Mimi, or worse, _Maureen_ walked in on Roger flicking the cool metal of his tongue piercing over the tip of Mark’s cock, and not-admittedly-very-different fantasies where Roger loses his composure completely, _finally,_ and grabs him by the hair to bend him over the couch to –

Mark groans quietly, squeezing his legs together as if that’s going to do anything. This was always his fucking problem. This is probably why he hasn’t gone out and gotten laid in so long.

_He just can’t stop fucking thinking about it._

Mark likes to think of himself as _intent_ and _focused,_ but he’s self-aware enough to admit that his obsessions get a little out of hand sometimes. (Often.) It’s not as if he wasn’t _already_ a bit fixated on Roger, and Roger’s hands, and Roger’s tattoos, and Roger’s _lips,_ before all of this started… But he recognizes, dimly, even as he’s shoving it down so that he doesn’t have to examine it too closely, that it’s morphing rapidly into something with more depth and more intensity than he’s ever felt before. Not even when he was fourteen and obsessed with the rabbi’s daughter. Not even when Maureen had his cock practically on a string, springing up for her at a moment’s notice.

The collar, Roger’s mouth, Roger’s fingers, Roger’s _cock –_

He can’t stop thinking about all of the things they _haven’t_ done yet. It’s like a fever shivering through his bones, making his fingers twitch and his mouth dry at random intervals. Mark wants Roger to fucking ruin him. Never mind that it’s been years since he’s had any significant anal action, he _needs_ Roger to spread his thighs apart and shove his cock up into him until it burns, until Mark has tears in his eyes, until it feels like the collar is fucking _choking_ him, God he wants Roger to buckle it around his neck and yank his head back, keep him right there on the cusp, to fuck into him while he’s struggling to breathe, trembling, and tell him what a good boy he’s being, he needs – he _needs_ –

This was _so_ far removed from when Mark used to use Roger and April as fantasy fodder that Mark can’t even comprehend it being _casual._ But it is. It’s so casual they don’t even really talk about it, and on one hand, Mark is obscenely glad not to _have_ to discuss it out loud that he can’t bring it up himself, but… on the other hand… it makes him want to tear his hair out, that Roger doesn’t seem to want to talk about it either.

 _Chickenshit_ , he grumbles at himself internally. _You fucking hypocrite_.

So, predictably, _now_ – with his glasses sliding down his nose, and his face flushed a splotchy, unattractive red and covered in a thin but noticeably shiny film of sweat (his acne was about to return with a vengeance, he could already feel it), and what was most likely an impressive case of helmet hair – now, the whole thing, this sort-of-not-really impromptu visit, just feels… like a ridiculous ploy for attention.

Never mind that it kind of, sort of is.

Attention is not something that Mark normally finds himself actively craving. Oh, sure, it was nice once in a while to have all eyes on him. He wasn’t complaining any time he ended up in the center of a big, squishy group hug (most of which were the result of too much marijuana and not enough sleep, collectively) with his friends surrounding him like a wonderful warm wall between Mark’s fragile self-esteem and the outside world, which seems determined to crush it out of him. Yeah, he’s maybe a little more… _needy_ , on the inside, than he likes to let on, but Mark isn’t an attention whore. Definitely not the way that _Maureen_ is. (He loves her, he does, but she can be a bit exhausting even on a good day.)

Mark likes the way the city makes him feel small. He’s nothing more than a blemish here, unnoticed, unimpressive, and _that_ made lugging his camera around the city every day filming pigeons and street artists all the more beautiful.

Because when people aren’t paying attention to you, they’re more genuine. That’s the thing that keeps Mark pinned here, despite every shitty thing that’s happened. The city feels brighter, more honest, than Scarsdale and it’s stuffy rich-kid, doctor-dad population ever could have.

Sincerity is just so hard to come by, when everyone around him is a little bit cracked, worn around the edges. But it reminds him of why he stayed.

Mark’s not looking for attention. He doesn’t really know _what_ he’s looking for. Validation? Reciprocation? It’s all up in the fucking air.

The fact of the matter is that something supernatural is obviously going on here, and Mark needs to step it up if he wants to stay in control of the madness that is getting off with Roger Davis on a regular basis. Mark is only human, after all, and being sucked off behind the register you work at every day by the guy you’ve been living-with and lusting-after for the better part of a decade is apparently… slightly overwhelming. No wonder he’s so off-kilter.

(The act itself hadn’t lost any of its luster when Roger arrived home that same night and pinned his hips to the wall for a repeat performance, either.)

 _Mindblowing,_ his mind supplies eagerly. Just the memory of it is making him chafe against his pants. Mark squirms and tries to think of anything else. Anything but Roger nuzzling against his cock, the swollen, wet look of his lips as he’d pulled away…

It was _pornographic_.

His brain was short circuiting. He literally just _can’t_ focus on anything else. Not on his farce of a screenplay that’s never really going to get written, not on Collins rambling at him about the pros and cons of nonmonogamy in a capitalist society, not even on the bike ride here. He can’t remember the last time he felt so off-balance. Roger’s like an infection in his brain, burning deeper every second he lets this go on, and Mark is teetering on the world’s most pleasant knife-edge of giddy uncertainty every day it keeps up.

He’ll happily let it kill him if it means that he never has to let go of the fantasy. The thrill.

_Fucking transcendent._

The obsession is really starting to get a bit out of hand, not that Mark has much of a say in it anymore.

Suddenly he can’t remember if he brought his wallet. Anxiety spiking, he abandons the lock for a moment and thrusts his hand into his satchel in search of it. People are definitely watching him squat here and rummage around in his bag – maybe some of them are wondering if it’s even his bag, if this is even his bike, maybe someone is going to call the cops if he takes too long, _fuck I hope it’s in there –_

Nothing could be more horrifically embarrassing than Roger thinking that he only came to see if he could mooch a few free drinks. All of his grand seduction plans, down the drain.

This is a bad idea.

_How am I supposed to seduce him, anyway? It’s not like we can kick everyone out of the bar so that I can suck his cock._

He misses the lock a couple more times. Winces when he scrapes the bed of his thumbnail against it while he’s not paying attention.

This is _such_ a bad idea.

This is absurd. It’s fucking _ludicrous_ that not only did he _think_ that biking half an hour in the ninety-some degree heat was an okay idea, but he actually went and did it. Stupid. Mark feels fucking stupid, but he’s here now, so that has to count for something… right?

 _Sweat is sexy,_ Mark tells himself futilely when he steps away from his bike and anxiously attempts to flatten his hair in the distorted reflection of the tinted windows in front of him.

Regular sweat does _not_ feel as sexy as sex-having sweat, though.

_But it’s the same thing!_

Well. Maybe. Probably not.

He grimaces and pushes through the front door.

He’s already here. He repeats it in his mind over and over and over until it becomes background noise, but the only part of him that really seems to believe it is his dick, which can’t be trusted anymore.

He’s _already here._

Might as well follow through.

The air conditioning envelopes him immediately, a cool bubble of instant-relief, and Mark groans out loud. The sweat dripping down his back turns icy, but he can’t even care. It feels fucking beautiful right now. He probably doesn’t _smell_ beautiful though. A group of giggling twenty-something girls with scandalously short, wispy skirts sweep through the doorway behind him and he trips over himself to get out of their way, paranoid that they’re going to smell him and pass out right there from sheer disgust. The wall is his friend.

They don’t even spare him a glance, though, and Mark feels himself begin to deflate. His heart rate has finally started to slow.

He has a game plan somewhere in the back of his mind, he just has to find it. Sucking in a deep, blissful breath of artificially cold air, Mark glances around and pretends he’s not searching out the quickest escape routes.

There’s a coat check across from him, manned by an attendant who looks, first of all, as if he’s not even old enough to buy himself a drink, and also as if he’s just a few seconds shy of a really excellent nap. The rising, swelling There’s a spot of what is probably drool at the corner of his lip. Mark quickly looks away from him before they can make awkward, accidental eye contact. Awkward accidental eye contact is the bane of Mark’s existence. He’s prone to it. Instead, he looks out toward the bar.

He remembers all at once why he stopped going to them the second that Roger quit playing three nights a week.

Bars are loud, and crowded, and _rowdy_. That’s three strikes, where Mark is concerned.

At first glance, he can’t even spot Roger behind the bar.

_Shit._

Still, he can’t let that deter him. Roger probably just has his hands full. He’s probably busy. Mark creeps out from the entrance, partially because it’s becoming increasingly obvious that he’s in the way every time the door opens to usher in another wave of people, and partly because if he stands there any longer, the temptation to just flee and pretend this never happened will become too much. And the humiliation of _that_ just might kill him.

He rubs the sweaty heel of his palm against the too-familiar shape of the collar, which is, as always, scrunched up inside his pocket like a promise. He cranes his neck. Wonders if Roger is thinking about him right now, about the collar in his pocket… about sliding it around Mark’s neck at _long fucking last_ and yanking him up by it.

They still haven’t gotten around to doing that.

Damn it, though, where _is_ Roger?

The sheer ridiculousness of this venture is starting to really hit him, and Mark is starting to feel a little sick with it. He’s so… he’s just so naïve. Always getting so fucking far ahead of himself. What was he _thinking?_ Mark coming to see _Roger_ at work is ridiculous, because it’s _Roger._ Roger doesn’t enjoy dealing with a lot of people to begin with, not up close and personal like he has to be as a server. As a bartender. Mark shouldn’t be visiting him when he’s already probably forcing himself to focus on what is probably the most aggravating job on the planet to him.

Privately, Mark’s not even sure that Roger belongs in the service industry. Scratch that… He knows that he doesn’t. Knows it without ever having to ask, because Roger’s never been shy about things that piss him off, and “people” has always been his number one pet peeve. Roger thrives where he can be _creative._ Where he can be provocative. Where he can be looked at, but not touched. Mark’s never understood why Roger always applies for jobs like this, where no one ever really looks at him. It’s a crime, really. Roger could be a porn star, easily – not the overly-muscular hunk type, no, but… he’s just so fucking pretty. Leonine, and smooth, the way he moves… the way his _lips_ move, it’s like…

Mark realizes that he’s getting off-track again, and takes a few more hesitant steps toward the bar top, sizing up the huddle of laughing college-aged kids directly in front of him and going to war with his own anxiety.

It’s really, really hard to focus, though, now that he’s back to thinking about Roger’s mouth again. The shiny metal ball sitting warm at the center of his tongue. How he likes to smirk at Mark from across the room and poke it out between his lips,  sucking it back into his mouth before Collins can turn around and see him.

Mark bites hard on the inside of his cheek. The sweat on his back is starting to dry now, and the feeling is truly disgusting.

Bad idea. _Worst_ idea. Mark hates himself.

The crowd shifts and parts for a few moments. He catches a glimpse of the tight, detached smile he knows from countless nights out at the bars Roger worked at over the years. Before he can so much as wave, Roger is turning back toward the other side of the bar to take someone’s order.

“Hey,” Mark shouts, waving anyway. Roger doesn’t turn around. No one pays him much attention, but he still feels stupid as he brings his hand back down and shoves it into his pocket, taking a deep breath and pushing forward into the crowd.

He has to at least say hi. Maybe order a drink, just to have an excuse to watch Roger’s hands while he makes it. He’s got faded letters inked onto the backs of his fingers that probably no one else can read, but Mark knows that they spell “fuck off!”, knows that Roger’s old buddy Marshal had done it for him one night when they were just buzzed teenagers who thought they were cool, before Mark had even known him, and the knowledge feels extra warm. It feels _special_.

 _Mark_ feels special for knowing all of these tiny little nothing facts about Roger, for having all of the pieces of the puzzle when most people only had a handful to work with.

But right now he just really wants to stare at Roger’s fingers and imagine them crawling up the inside of his thigh again. Brushing teasingly at his balls, hot breath on his ear…

_Fuck, yes, Roger, please…_

Was he always this much of a pervert? Mark takes a stuttering breath, tries to shake the mental image out of his head.

_You’re in public, jackass. Keep it in your pants!_

He bumps into half a dozen people, apologies stumbling out of his mouth in a constant stream as he strains to meet Roger’s eyes. It’s not working. Roger is sliding drinks across the bar top in every direction _but_ Mark’s, or it seems like it.

It’s not like it’s _not_ impressive. Mixing drinks that quickly is an acquired skill, obviously, and Mark was a hundred percent certain that he’d fuck it up immediately if he ever tried. But he’s used to seeing Roger grinding up against a guitar, fingers sliding along the strings like lightning. Watching him pour strawberries and shots of rum into a blender is lackluster in comparison, no matter how smoothly he does it. No matter how he twists his wrist when he squirts whipped cream into the top of the glass.

Being onstage, according to Roger, was a completely different experience to anything else he’d ever done in his life. He’d explained it to Mark once, voice soft and lazy while they laid together on their sides on Mark’s mattress one night, facing each other in the dark. It was months ago, back when Roger had just started this job – his first steady job since April, the diagnosis, the rehab, which made it _hugely significant_ whether Roger wanted to admit it or not – but Mark remembers it vividly, remembers everything Roger says in that shy, straightforward way. For Roger, being onstage had been an almost religious experience. It was bright and hot and loud, and he could look down on the people beneath him like conduits, channel their energy, their sweat and starry eyes and hoarse, excited screams, and turn it into art.

And while an argument could probably be made for bartending as an art-form, Roger wasn’t particularly invested in it. For one, no manager was ever going to let him bring his guitar behind the bar and strum at it between mixing cocktails and replacing bowls of popcorn.

Coming to see Roger at his shows was an act of worship, a treat.

Roger coming to see _Mark_ at work was special because Mark works at a fucking porn shop, which obviously didn’t get swarmed by hundreds of drunk, disorderly barely-adults on the regular.

Mark clutches his bag to his chest out of learned fear when he gets close enough to see the sweat on the glasses, always wary of wandering hands, and inches closer to where Roger is currently trying to explain to an apparently brainless young woman why her tab was so high. Mark doesn’t mind brushing shoulders with people, he does that all the time – they live in _Manhattan_ – but for some reason, he does have an issue when there are walls involved. It just feels – more claustrophobic, or something, he doesn’t know. He just hates it. The sweat is starting to form again at his temples and he groans inwardly at the thought of smelling even worse than he already does, willing his pores to suck it right back up.

“Roger,” he tries again, forcing himself to smile. He hopes his hair isn’t too appalling to look at; no one is staring and pointing at him, but Mark is pretty forgettable, and he’s pretty sure that most people look right past him on instinct. Which is good. Because right now, he’s covered in street grime and sun-baked sweat, and he’s pretty sure he’s got a nasty sunburn beginning to blister on the back of his pasty pale neck.

Roger doesn’t hear him. There’s a deafening shriek as one of the brawnier boys down the bar picks a tiny pixie of a girl up and hauls her over his shoulder for a laugh, and she pounds at his back, giggling, while he throws back another shot to the goading chants of their friends. Mark flinches at the noise, then screws up his courage and shouts, “Hey! Roger! _Rog.”_

The girl Roger’s still talking to none-too-patiently is flirting with him. Mark sucks in a breath and lets it out slowly, the jealousy slipping through his veins no matter how hard he tries to stuff down the initial spike of it. _You have no right,_ he chastises himself, but, but, well – doesn’t he?

She can’t be any older than Mark, probably a few years younger, and her complexion is flawless. Mark feels his guts twist even harder. She’s pale (but not the way Mark is) in a luminous, attractive way, and there’s a subtle hint of pink glitter over her eyes and on her lips, which are curved into an inviting smile as she leans in closer to give Roger a sneak peek at her cleavage in a matching sheer pink cowl-neck top.

And Mark is standing over here smelling no doubt like he’s been rolling around in an alley, looking more like he needs a shower than a good hard fuck.

Suddenly, he’s glad that Roger hasn’t heard him yet. His stomach is wound up in so many knots that he doesn’t feel like he’ll ever be able to eat again. _Stupid, stupid, stupid._ It barely even matters that Roger looks supremely annoyed, rather than interested. Mark’s too worried about being seen now to notice that. Head full of unwanted, half-formed images of Roger leading Pink Shirt Girl up the stairs to their apartment are bombarding him, and Mark is miserable, tripping over himself to back out of the crowd, out of the bar, not even pausing to wave back at the confused coat check attendant.

The heat slaps him in the face the moment he steps outside, but he can’t mourn the loss of the air conditioning properly right now. He’s too busy fumbling with his bike chain again, muttering curses when his shaking fingers miss the lock.

This was such a shitty idea. Such a _Mark_ idea, fuck. He should have known better. He should have thought about it for five seconds before committing to it.

Should have gone back inside earlier when he noticed how godawful hot it was, endured Collins’ constant leading comments and knowing grins, should have just spared himself the embarrassment, the insecurity…

It’s still unbearably humid, and Mark is loath to get back on his bike, but he doesn’t really have the money for a cab when he’s got perfectly good legs, and honestly the walk would only prolong the torture of having to be outside.

He sighs and swings his leg over, grimacing at the uncomfortable warmth of the seat.

 _That’s it,_ he thinks resignedly. _I’m never leaving the apartment again. I’ll just climb inside the walls and live off of moldy Cheez-its until Roger stops looking for me and moves out with his new girlfriend, and I can die in peace._

It was presumptuous of him to think it went both ways, anyways.

His mind is full of unwanted, irrational tangents now, and they spin and spin until he’s almost too dizzy to steer. He keeps pushing the pedals. Tries to breathe. Tries to banish them, regain some of his composure.

But what if one of them is right?

Maybe Roger wasn’t trying to inconvenience him when he chose this job; maybe he just wanted some distance. Maybe he just wanted a place where he could flirt with pretty girls and find other people to hook up with, where Mark wouldn’t see, where Mark couldn’t overreact and get horribly jealous every time he saw Roger touching someone else. That hasn’t happened yet, but its occurred to Mark every day since this started – interrupted his thoughts at work, in the shower, even when he’s lying tangled up in Roger’s lanky limbs at night listening to him snore and staring at the ceiling – and he knows, somehow, _knew_ that this would happen.

He feels like he’s in the crowded bar again, lungs tight and hands shaking, like the world is closing in on him at the thought of Roger wanting nothing more than to not have to deal with Mark’s reaction when he puts an end to this weird rebound friend-sex thing they’ve been carrying on, and finally dives into a new relationship.

A _real_ relationship.

Mark’s hands are clammy around the handlebars. He feels abruptly truly, physically ill.

If Roger regrets starting this… if, only if, but it’s an if that won’t get out of his fucking head now that it’s in there rattling around, blowing up huge like a mushroom cloud obscuring any other rational thought. If Roger ever _regrets_ touching Mark, then Mark is just going to have to die. He can’t even conceptualize anything else, any other outcome. He’s going to have to just kill himself, because _fuck,_ because he _knew_ this was a bad idea, because the only reason Roger had gotten this idea into his head in the first place was because they were both completely strung out on some weird sex drug!

Mark wants to lean his head forward on the handlebars and just swerve. Just, just – just swerve right into traffic, right into the street. Because _fuck it._

Roger’s the only reason he stayed in the city after that first year, the only reason he can come up with to get out of bed some mornings and resign himself to another excruciating workday. If he lost Roger, all because he couldn’t find the willpower to bat his hands away from his zipper when Roger was _clearly_ not serious, clearly _couldn’t be,_ this was complete madness, Mark is _Mark_ and Roger is…

Roger is…

Roger is just…

Mark can’t even bring himself to finish the sentence. His head feels like it’s splitting open with guilt and self-loathing and completely unwarranted anxiety, and this time Roger’s not here to talk him down.

To his horror, the sidewalk is starting to blur in front of him. Mark pulls his bike over sharply toward the nearest building and dismounts, knees nearly giving out on him, one palm to the brick to steady himself. He’s not crying. He’s not. There’s _nothing_ to cry about, but his eyes are full of burning moisture anyway, threatening to spill over any second if he doesn’t get a fucking hold of himself and behave like a functional human being.

 _Roger’s never had a boyfriend before,_ his brain reminds him nastily. Not that Mark’s been introduced to, anyway.

Roger’s never invited him to the bar before. It had never occurred to Mark (well, not in any more than things like that normally do in passing, which he’s pretty good at stomping down after years of practice) that it might be because he needs a break – from Mark, from the loft, from everything. For all of the pains he goes to, Mark knows that he’s still a huge burden on his friends whenever they’re out in the real world together… sometimes even when they’re staying in. He knows that his anxiety is suffocating to him, but he can’t help but feel like sometimes it creeps up and tries to strangle them as well. Drag them all down with him.

And Roger is the only person who has to live with him now. Roger is around him _all the time._ He must be so fucking sick of Mark’s shit by now – maybe that’s even why this is all… happening. Maybe – Mark feels his chest seize up at the thought, clutches at it uselessly as if he can reach between his ribs and squeeze his frantic heart back into submission – maybe Roger had only wanted to screw around with him to keep things interesting, because otherwise being around Mark is like being constantly, slowly scraped with metaphorical sandpaper.

 _Fuck this_. Mark doesn’t fucking want to have to deal with himself, either. He blinks back tears of frustration, staring through them and the dirty lenses of his glasses at the sinking sun.

It’s evening now, but the crowds haven’t thinned, and if anything they’ll soon be even bigger (and rowdier) once the bars start getting _really_ packed. Mark feels around in the trembling hollow of his chest for any semblance of urgency to get back home and comes up very short. He’s abruptly very tired.

It doesn’t really matter what he tells himself. He knows how to logic this all away, of course he does, he spends half of his time doing just that.

_Breathe, Mark._

It’s hard to remember right now, but the panic will ebb if he can just breathe. Mark tries to focus on that instead and for the next fifteen minutes, he stands against a nondescript building with his head in his hands, blocking out the noise and the lights and the presence of other people, the whole world, and just tries to find his calm.

_In… and out… In… and out._

It’s a testament to his many years of practice that eventually he finds himself able to move again without wanting to puke. Mark lifts his head and, sluggishly, begins pulling his bike down the street. Doesn’t really feel safe to get back on it right now. The city slowly comes back into focus beyond the tip of his sneakers.

Fortunately, Mark was blessed with an intrusive but unerring sense of logic to complement his constant, nauseating anxiety, and by the time he’s approaching the corner store that they usually have to grab their eggs at when it’s eight a.m. and they’re desperately hungover, he’s realized that he might have… overreacted.

Maybe.

Just a little.

The sun is starting to sink and carry the sweltering heat away with it. Mark appreciates it in a distant, exhausted kind of way. His clothes are sticking to him in the worst way. No, not the worst way, he corrects himself with a wince. It was only a few days ago that he’d fallen asleep in a puddle of his own come with Roger draped half on top of him and woken up glued to the sheets. _That_ was disgusting. Roger had found it hilarious, though.

He misses Roger right now, and it makes him feel even sillier. Why had he run? Why had he gone, but also, why hadn’t he at least waited to say hi? Who cares what Pink Shirt Girl would have said, or thought? It would have been nice. Would have kept him tided over until their inevitable rendezvous in the bedroom later tonight. It wouldn’t have been this sad empty-handed trek home that he’s making right now.

The lump of the-collar-he-has-yet-to-wear in his pocket is impossible to forget. He wants to rub at it, but he can’t stave off the paranoia that someone might notice and get the wrong idea. Mark doesn’t want to be _that guy._ Idly, he wonders again if he should just try buckling it on himself, but… no, that wouldn’t feel right, somehow, he just – he just _knows._

What Mark needs – what he _really needs,_ what he can’t stop thinking about now that he’s had Roger’s mouth wrapped around his cock – is to have Roger fuck into him, actually _fuck_ him, while he tugs at the ring on the front of that damned collar.

Maybe he’s taking Roger’s little lust-fueled speeches a little too much to heart. All the “you belong to _me”_ and “no one else can own you” shit, it makes Mark’s thighs tremble, sends a flare of heady arousal to the tip of his cock every time he remembers it, but it can’t be _real._

In a way, none of this feels real. Mark is still half-convinced that he’s walking around in the world’s longest wet dream, and any day now he’s going to wake from his coma and Roger is still going to be happily screwing Mimi every night while Mark lies in bed hard and unspeakably jealous, longing, desperate to know what it’s like.

Despite the overwhelming sense of embarrassment that won’t leave him alone, Mark is still having trouble keeping his mind off of Roger and the way he presses his thumbs into the bony indents of his hips, presses him down into the mattress. Against the wall. Against the back of the couch. (That one had been especially nerve-wracking, if only because Collins was snoring in the next room, but Roger had been insistent and Mark’s willpower blew away like so much dust in the wind whenever Roger looked at him _like that._ )

Thus far, Roger has been eager to please. (Mark thinks it should probably be the other way around, but he’s not complaining.) So it occurs to him suddenly that if he wants it so bad – Roger’s cock in his mouth, in his ass, hell, in _any_ part of him – then what’s stopping him from just fucking asking for it and seeing what happens?

 _Anxiety,_ his brain supplies. But the thought is intriguing.

The cornerstore is bright and familiar beside him, and peering through the window gives Mark a possibly-terrible, terribly-exciting idea. Before he can talk himself out of it he’s propping his bike against the building and dashing inside, already fumbling for his wallet again. He’s got to prove to himself that he can still be daring, still be seductive… Even if his original plan for the day had gone awry.

No matter how unlikely he thought it was that Roger would acquiesce on the first try, Mark wants to be absolutely fucking sure that he’s prepared.

Better safe than sorry, right?

* * *

 

Mark normally confides all of his woes in Collins, up to and including the sexual ones.

(Well… _Especially_ the sexual ones.)

Today, however, he would rather throw himself off the roof than explain why he’s smuggling an excessive amount of lube and an even more absurd number of condoms in a plastic bag into his bedroom. So he skirts around Collins – who is eating a parfait on the couch, feet kicked up, and yelling something about Mark needing a shower because he stinks to high heaven, which Mark believes – and runs immediately to his bedroom, slamming the door shut tight behind him.

It’s becoming a really awful habit of his, lately. Everything behind closed doors. There’s probably a metaphor in there somewhere but Mark is too horny to go looking for it right now.

He tosses the bag onto the tangled sheets carefully and begins shucking off his pants, watching the little foil packages spill out across the bedspread. The sight of it makes his heart pound. _I’m really doing this,_ he thinks almost deliriously, _I’m gonna suck Roger’s dick._

It just doesn’t feel _real_. Maybe he’s just having a particularly lengthy, vivid sex dream that’s so good he hasn’t been able to force himself to wake up from it; he can see it now, Roger and Collins and Maureen all standing over him worriedly, trying to shake him awake while he snores and ruts against the mattress. It could happen. Mark’s been fantasizing about this for nearly as long as he’s known Roger, and lately it’s been fucking impossible to stop wondering how it would feel. Which is stupid. It’s not like Mark’s never sucked a dick _before,_ of fucking course he has, because oral is the _best_ and if he wants it, he figures he’d better be willing to return the favor.

On top of that, though, Mark is a pretty tactile person when it comes down to it, loathe as he is to admit it. He learns with his hands. And his mouth. He likes to touch things, touch people, try to understand how they work.

He’s starting to understand how Roger works, now that it’s been a few weeks, now that he’s gotten to watch him come a few times. The way he comes apart (fingers flexing, lips parting, breath whooshing out, _beautiful_ ) and how his breath evens out as he’s coming back together. Mark wants to be the one to do that to him, not just a lusting spectator. He’s _so sick_ of sitting on the sidelines for everything. It’s like he’s the fucking camera, not the person holding it. Just recording. The world passing by him, never noticing him, never touching him. He’s not going to let that be his sex life too! If Roger’s scared of getting him sick, well, Mark can understand that, but there’s a reckless energy living in him that he wants to let loose. He never thought he’d get to do this. He never thought that Roger would _want_ him like this, and he’s going to get as much out of this as he can. _You never know when a good thing might run out._

If Roger finds a new partner tomorrow and gets caught up in the romance of it all, just like he did with Mimi… Mark wants to have something left of this. Just one memory. One time that he got Roger off, with his hands, with his mouth, instead of watching him in post-orgasmic bliss.

The condoms are a rainbow-wrapped assortment scattered on top of his bed. He opens his nightstand drawer and takes out the ancient box he’d had in there, from before he and Maureen had stopped having rebound sex once a week, and chucks it in the garbage bag lying half-full on the floor beside the door. Someday he’s going to remember to get an actual bin for his room. Today is not that day. Mark sweeps the pile of condoms into the drawer all at once, all but one, which he hesitates before setting on top of the nightstand alongside his brand new, gigantic, unopened tube of KY jelly. Three quick tugs and some shuffling fixes the bedsheets (as much as Mark deems necessary, anyway.) He steps back toward the door and stares at his handiwork.

 _There_. He can’t make it any more obvious than _that,_ can he?

Maybe this way if the words get stuck in his throat Roger will still get the idea, and he won’t have to stutter the question out at all.

Roger’s still got a couple of hours left at the bar. It’s probably safe, he reasons, to take the edge off in the meantime so that he won’t embarrass himself later.

Collins isn’t paying much attention, so he’s able to creep down the hall to the bathroom and close the door without being harassed. He’s silently thankful for the silence. Right now, Mark isn’t sure he’s fit for human company, unless it’s Roger – not that he’s about to jump Collins’ bones just for being a warm body in the same room as him, but… He’s a walking hard-on right now, and it would be horrifically embarrassing to have to explain it if Collins were to notice in the middle of a conversation about the weather. Then he’d want _all_ of the details, right then immediately, and Mark doesn’t think Tom is above getting him in a headlock and tickling the answers out of him.

 _Just think about what it would be like if Maureen still lived here,_ his inner voice snickers.

Mark’s hands are still shaking a little as he fiddles with the temperature knob. He tries to will the tremors away, but he can’t focus for more than a handful of seconds without veering straight back to wondering what Roger’s thick cock would feel like stretching his lips apart, how the weight of it would feel on his tongue.

The water is hot but not scalding when he gets in. Roger likes it hot enough to melt the first layer of his skin off, but Mark likes to be able to breathe while he’s bathing. He tips his head back and screws his eyes shut while the water beats down through the layer of street grime he’s accumulated on his arms and his face, the sweaty buildup on his back, washes it all away so that Roger won’t smell him and change his mind. He’s _going_ to say yes. Mark feels his heart stutter anxiously, doubtfully, but he digs his nails into the back of his neck and mentally chants, _I’m going to suck his dick if it kills me,_ over and over again until he can’t help but snort out loud, spraying water away from his mouth.

His hand slides down his front and around his cock, wet and warm and all he really needs to get going after the day his imagination has had. “Roger,” he groans quietly.

The sound of it, even encased safely in the steam, sends a pleasant shudder down the length of his spine. _Roger, Roger, Roger._ He wishes Roger were in the shower with him, listening to him whimper, pinning him against the cold tile on the wall and watching him bring himself off in the small space between them.

He can see it in his mind – his fist tightens on the next pull, breath hitching, awareness narrowing acutely to the frantic friction of his hand around himself – can see that damn tongue ring poking out between Roger’s lips as he licks them, slow and sensual, can see the way his tattoos would darken under the spray, can almost _feel_ the pressure of Roger’s hands on his shoulders, shoving him down to his knees, gripping tight in the short hair at the back of his neck and guiding his mouth to his flushed cock hanging desperately hard between his legs –

It doesn’t take him long to come once his knees hit the porcelain. Mark hangs onto the side of the tub and gasps for breath, eyes still shut to preserve the depraved images for just a few more seconds.

 _Gonna suck his dick,_ he thinks, blinking his eyes open in time to watch his come wash down the drain blurrily.

He just had to make it to when Roger got home tonight.

* * *

 

“Mark!” Roger calls before he’s even all the way in the front door. “I need you to do me a favor and shoot me in the fucking head.”

Mark sets his camera down hastily and trips over his own feet running to the door, one sock pulling halfway off his foot. Roger is toeing out of the ugly brown shoes he wears at work, and Mark only narrowly manages to dodge the corner of his nametag as he rips it off his shirt and flings it across the room. “Sorry,” Roger mutters, only half-paying attention as he strips himself out of his uniform right there in the doorway, right down to his boxers. He even peels his socks off and tosses them lazily toward the laundry pile, which has migrated to the living room since the last time Mark went to the Laundromat.

“To what do we owe today’s bout of suicidal ideation?” Mark asks, hands up in surrender as he approaches. Roger reaches for him, collapsing against him with a pathetic noise in the back of his throat. He’s heavier than Mark, even if not by much, and Mark stumbles backwards with the effort of keeping him upright. He turns his face into Roger’s hair and hopes that he won’t notice the way his heart is racing between them. Collins has gone to bed rather than wait up for Angel, who’s doing some work under the table for one of Maureen’s theatre friends, designing costumes. The loft is eerily quiet even though it’s only nine p.m.

“Why did you let me apply at another bar, Mark?” Roger groans, muffled into his neck. Mark carefully begins the process of walking them backwards toward the bedroom. His clothes already feel suffocating; with any luck, though, he won’t be wearing them much longer. He’s a little ashamed of how difficult it is to focus on Roger’s griping. “I _hate_ bars.”

“I know you do,” Mark says distractedly. He feels along the wall with the hand that’s not busy rubbing Roger’s back soothingly. “I don’t know why you applied there, either. I told you not to.”

“ _Three separate people_ almost puked on me today, Mark! I can’t take it. They don’t pay me enough for this shit.”

“You could come work with me,” Mark offers without an ounce of sincerity. Roger pulls back to glare at him balefully, and Mark pushes open the door to their bedroom and flicks the light switch, illuminating their collective mess.

“ _No,_ I cannot come and work with you at the fucking porn shop. I don’t think you understand,” Roger begins heatedly, before his eyes catch on the nightstand and his jaw snaps shut.

Mark feels the heat of his own blush traveling up his neck and into his cheeks, threatening to close around his throat. Hours of rehearsed lines and failed attempts at focusing on his plotline-in-progress (which now has three named characters, a title, and… no main conflict whatsoever) had not prepared him for the force of his own nerves, sharpened by the hard-on that’s been coming and going since ten minutes after his shower earlier in the evening.

He forces himself to meet Roger’s eyes, struggling to keep his voice even as he says, like an amateur porn star, “I was thinking maybe I could distract you.”

 _I was thinking that maybe you could fuck me until neither of us can walk,_ is what he really wanted to say, but he thought that might be a little too much too soon.

“Fuck, Mark.” Seemingly despite himself, Roger’s eyes glow like green embers at the suggestion. He swallows as he steps around Mark into the room, eyes darting around suspiciously as if he expects Mark to have hidden a stripper or a bunch of kinky sex toys amidst the junk to surprise him. Mark hangs back in the doorway for a moment, unsure; but when Roger kneels up onto the bed and reaches for the lube to squint at the label he steps the rest of the way inside and shuts the door behind him as quietly as he can.

Collins had _said_ he’d be sleeping, and Mark wasn’t about to risk waking him up when he was (hopefully) about to have the chance to make Roger swear and scream and beg the way Roger made _him_ before he came.

The tension in Roger’s shoulders doesn’t bode well, though. Mark takes another step closer and lets his insecurity get the best of him. “Um, I mean. Only… only if you want. I just thought…”

For a long, uncomfortable second, it seems like Roger is waiting for him to continue the sentence. When he doesn’t, Roger licks his lips – there’s the flash of his tongue ring again, God, Mark will never not be transfixed by that – and twists around onto his back, splaying his legs like an invitation. His voice is mostly ( _mostly_ ) even when he asks, “Did you have something specific in mind?”

Mark is compelled to elaborate. He can physically feel Roger’s trepidation, and he hates it. “I was thinking about the stunt you pulled at the video store the other day,” he says, voice wobbling. His legs carry him to the bed without his permission, and he crawls up toward Roger like they’re magnets, like Roger’s pull is just too much for him to resist.

Roger reaches for him again but this time he yanks him on top of him, lips searching for the perfect juncture to sink his teeth in, maybe to distract Mark from finishing his sentence. Instead, the sudden, perfect pleasure-pain that shoots down his body from his neck to his cock just strengthens his resolve. Mark plants his palms against the mattress and sits up and away, batting at Roger’s hands when he tries to pull him down again.

“You’re not listening!” he complains, biting back a smile at Roger’s pout. To placate him (also maybe to build up to what he’s trying to spit out) he rubs a hand slowly up the inside of Roger’s thigh, brushing the side of his hand teasingly along the length of the hardening flesh there.

“I’m listening, I’m listening,” Roger grumbles, biting his lip and tipping his head back. The beginnings of a smirk are twitching at the corners of his lips. He’s trying too hard to appear relaxed. Mark blurts it out before he can turn chicken.

“I wanna return the favor.”

Roger freezes. His hands don’t fall away from Mark’s shoulders, but he stops pulling for the moment, a myriad of emotions crossing over his face in quick succession before he settles on a carefully neutral grimace. Mark’s heart does _not_ plummet into the vicinity of his ankles (yes, yes it does.)

“Why not?” he asks, perhaps too petulantly, maybe too quickly. He can’t help it. It slips out from between the fingers he’s clamped over his mouth like smoke. He has to know, is already shaking again, even though he can think of a thousand answers to that question himself, but he _needs to know_ why Roger won’t let him.

Why he doesn’t _want_ him.

“Mark…” Roger shifts and squirms out from under Mark until he can sit up properly, legs still splayed awkwardly apart. He’s still inexplicably hard – Mark can’t imagine why, since apparently the thought of Mark sucking his cock is off-putting to him. “I want to, I just don’t think it’s _safe.”_

“I bought condoms,” Mark breathes. He can hear the pleading in his tone and feels horribly, horribly guilty for it being there. He doesn’t want to _pressure_ Roger into anything. He should just leave it alone. But he can’t.

“We can probably still find a use for those,” Roger offers weakly. “If you want.” His hands are shaking, now, too, which Mark only notices because his own eyes are fixed on the bedspread so as not to let Roger catch the way he’s blinking right now. He’s _not_ going to cry over something as stupid as this. It’s not like he’s never felt disappointment before, he can deal with it, he’s a fucking adult. It’s just – it just. It hurts.

It hurts way down to the part of his chest that’s so deep he doesn’t think he could reach it even if he cracked his ribcage open.

He wants to please Roger so _fucking much_.

He wants to make Roger come with just his mouth _._

Mark’s hand slides up Roger’s thigh again. There’s a wet patch over his cock, apparently still throbbing, and Mark is _so close_ , his mouth is _so close_ to exactly where it wants to be, he feels it flood with anticipatory saliva. “Roger,” he groans, trying desperately to reign in his suddenly wild emotions. “I’ll go slow, I won’t try to use teeth, I just – I _need_ to, I, you–”

Roger’s toes curl and his face twists in a promising stare of outright longing. “If I get you sick,” he starts, sounding miserable.

Mark cuts him off before he can get caught up in that dead end hypothetical. He’s tripping over his words, mouth wet and achingly ready. “I’ll be careful. You won’t even let me touch you, Roger, I’m going fucking crazy.” Roger looks at him doubtfully, and his desperation rachets up another few notches. “People do it! Mimi and Benny did it, and he never got sick.”

The moment it comes out of his mouth he panics, because _Mimi_ is not somebody that he should be bringing up in any sexual context for the rest of either of their lives, but Roger is starting to look dubious. Almost… hopeful. As if it’s too good to be true.

_It can be true right now! Hold me down and fuck my mouth!_

Mark’s libido needs to calm down.

“You’re right…” he says reluctantly. His hips arch slightly up off the mattress, and Mark smooths his fingers over the ridge of his erection, cups it like a promise. Roger’s mouth goes briefly lax at the attention.

“Please,” Mark says on impulse, and then, lower, looking up at him through his eyelashes bashfully, “ _Please._ I can’t stop thinking about your dick in my mouth. I wanna make you come like that – Roger…”

Back when they used to date, Maureen had sighed lovingly and told Mark that he was made for begging. He doesn’t ever remember being _this_ desperate for Maureen to let him touch her, though. Roger’s staring at him now like he can’t believe what’s coming out of his mouth, in a good way. His lips are parted on a response.

Mark leans down and draws a shaky line with his tongue up Roger’s thigh from the inside of his knee.

“Please,” he repeats, and Roger loses it.

He grabs Mark by the hair – it almost doesn’t work, Mark really needs to grow his hair out for this sort of thing, he should jot that down – and, instead of pulling him up and off, he pulls him forward until his head touches his belly, growling out, “I swear to fucking God, Mark, you’d better not tease.”

“Does that mean this is okay?” Mark asks, because he can’t shake the feeling that he’s coerced Roger into this somehow. His whole body feels like it’s vibrating with excitement. He’s so fucking hard his dick feels like it’s spasming with the beginnings of an orgasm already, and he has a sudden, visceral sympathy for Roger, who seems like he’s about to die of arousal every time he tips his head back and swallows Mark’s come.

God, that’s a filthy mental image. Where was _that_ earlier when he was whacking it in the shower?

Mark whimpers against Roger’s bare skin.

“I told you,” Roger says, voice dropping low and sultry. Mark’s arms nearly give out on him, but Roger’s fingers in his hair keep him upright, barely. He relishes the pull of it. “It’s not that I don’t _want_ your mouth. Fuck, Mark, you think I don’t imagine you on your knees for me every fucking second of the day?”

“Then let me,” Mark gasps. His scalp is really starting to hurt but for some reason, maybe because he doesn’t want to jinx it or maybe he’s just more into pain than he thought (which is likely), he can’t bring himself to pull away. “Let me suck your cock. Please. Please, please, _please._ ”

He can’t stop mumbling it. It feels right in his mouth, the shape of it, the wet pop of the ‘p’ as he stares down at Roger’s twitching cock through the so-very-thin material of his boxers. He can _smell_ how aroused he is – he can practically taste it – but it’s _not enough._

Unexpectedly, Roger shudders above him. “Jesus Christ,” he hears him say, sounding thoroughly shaken. “Mark, who taught you how to beg like that?”

“I want it so bad,” Mark whines. He doesn’t know how to articulate that he’s _never_ wanted so badly as Roger’s cock in his life, that he’s never been this ready to fork over his dignity and beg like this for _anyone_ else, ever. Ever. It would probably just come out sounding scripted anyway, and Mark doesn’t have time for scripts, right now. “Roger, _please.”_

“Please what?”

Roger seems fully on board with this game now, and Mark is so fucking ready that his arms really do give out, and Roger has to pull him up into a sitting position so that he can reach over and grab the condom hastily off of the nightstand. Mark watches in fevered awe as he kicks his boxers off and opens the foil carefully, so carefully with his fingers rather than his teeth. It’s still obvious – to Mark, at least, which might not count because Mark knows Roger almost _too_ well – that he’s nervous, but the anxiety that had crawled over his face in the moment Mark had first spoken the words is outweighed by the heavy weight of his balls, which look like they’re about to burst.

“Please,” Mark repeats, almost unable to choke out the next words. His glasses are going to fall off his face and he doesn’t even care. He’s struggling to get out of his own pants, failing spectacularly until Roger reaches over to tug on one leg of his jeans. “Please, I want to suck you. I want to suck you off.” He takes a deep breath, meant to steady him, but it just comes out in a rush as he blurts, “I want to feel you come in my mouth.”

Roger moans and gropes for his hair, pulling him forward into a bruisingly-hard, tongue-fucking kiss that lasts for several minutes. By the time he’s done licking his way into Mark’s throat Mark has managed to clamber into his lap, and for a heady moment he stays kneeling tantalizingly close to Roger’s rubber-covered cock, which is bobbing eagerly and _very close_ to Mark’s ass. But the moment passes before Mark can make anymore reckless suggestions, and Roger is guiding him down onto his knees, pulling his hair a little more gently as he presses his hips up and finally bumps his erection against Mark’s lower lip.

Now that he’s down here, Mark is not letting this opportunity pass him by. Oral is his _favorite thing._ He takes Roger’s length into his mouth greedily, pressing his tongue flat up against the underside of it, and hears Roger breathe harshly through his nose.

Spurred on by the tightening of fingers in his hair, he ruts his hips down against the mattress – can’t help it, can’t fucking help it, he’s so fucking hard and he needs to focus – and starts to bob his head. Roger doesn’t seem to know what to do with his hands, but that’s fine. It’s probably been a few months since he’s gotten head, and Mark knows (whether he ever wanted to or not) that despite being awfully kinky, Mimi was a bit touchy about her hair, so it’s possible that Roger hasn’t been given head like _this_ since April. The thought of that is oddly satisfying and Mark finds himself all the more eager to make this memorable, make Roger understand how _worth it_ this is, make absolutely fucking sure he doesn’t regret it.

It sure doesn’t sound like he regrets it when Mark wraps his lips around the base of his cock and sucks for all he’s worth. “Yes! Yes, Jesus, Mark, _yeah,”_ Roger groans. He lets go of Mark’s hair without warning, leaning back on his hands, apparently unable to keep himself upright with just one anymore. His hips keep thrusting minutely upward, which is making Mark’s eyes water, but _God it’s so worth it._

Roger’s got a wide cock. Mark has spent too many years fantasizing about the way it would stretch his mouth, but it’s somehow even wider in real life than he’d imagined, and his jaw is sore in practically no time at all.

He pulls back a little and wraps a sweaty palm around the base instead, using the saliva already dripping there to squeeze and pump upwards into his mouth. Roger’s teeth clack shut audibly. It sounds like he’s about to have a seizure, which in Mark’s experience means he’s doing e _verything_ right. He struggles not to grin and ruin the suction, fumbling blindly with his free hand for wherever Roger’s has disappeared to. He wants to guide it back to his hair, wants to feel the ache of the pull again, but Roger doesn’t seem to notice because he’s already starting to shake.

“Mark,” he says, loudly, brokenly, and if Collins hasn’t already woken up then he’s never going to. “Fuck – Mark, I’m gonna come, you should –”

Mark pulls back obediently. He figures he’s pushed it enough tonight; he can respect Roger’s boundaries, even if it makes his cock weep to think about how it would feel to have Roger’s dick pulsing in the back of his throat. “Please,” he says, lips numb and swollen. “I wanna feel you come.”

He tries the glancing-up-through-his-eyelashes thing again and Roger makes a noise between a moan and a hiss, hips jerking once wildly before he’s coming, and Mark stares down wide-eyed at the way the condom expands to accommodate it, the way his cock stiffens and shudders in his hand. He doesn’t stop pulling at it until Roger heaves a tortured sigh, and then he stuffs the same hand he’d been using down toward the front of his own ruined boxers, fully intending to bring himself off in three strokes or less before he fucking explodes.

He can feel the blood pounding against his skin, in his throat and his wrists and his fucking dick. Roger grabs his wrist and it’s all he can do not to break down and start rubbing up against his leg. “Please, please, oh God –” he almost sobs.

Roger wraps his hand around Mark’s cock and smears the glob of precome dripping down the length of it back up over the head. He’s still breathing hard, staring at Mark intensely, though Mark can hardly see because his glasses are so fogged up from their body heat. “I fucking love it when you beg,” he growls, shoving Mark forcefully onto his back.

Mark barely has time to react before his back hits the mattress, letting out a startled breath and then _screaming_ when Roger’s mouth descends around his cock like he’s starving for it. He comes in seconds and can’t even find it in him to be ashamed, too busy floating through the fireworks going off between his ears, reveling the electricity that’s jolting through his veins and making him curl in on himself.

It’s so hot, it’s so _good,_ he thinks he almost blacks out. When he finally regains his ability to string together coherent sentences, Roger has disposed of the condom and has flopped down beside him, one arm draped over him and his nose pressing into Mark’s shoulder.

“That… was incredible,” Mark mutters, still seeing sparks. Roger huffs out a tired laugh.

“You’re going to abuse that all the time now, aren’t you,” he says, and they _both_ know what he’s talking about. Mark can’t stop himself from grinning.

“Probably.”


	6. day 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> day 5 prompt: humiliation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello friends... this took ages longer than I expected, partially because it's a fucking MONSTER at 14k, and partially because I have big hangups about writing dialogue and kept going back and tweaking it. It always amazes me how I spend 85% of the time I write a chapter just working on the character development, dialogue, and moving the plot along rather than writing the actual smut (which takes like 20mins if I can focus) ANYWAY! I meant to post this a week ago, but I'm a mess of a human being. Here you are! I know it just barely lives up to the prompt but at this point in the story I'm not entirely sure they're "there" for serious humiliation roleplay, so. Sorry. Might do something like that in a later chapter, though ;)

Somehow, Mark had not anticipated just how uncomfortable it would be to have the loft full of their friends again now that they’re fucking.

“You’re early,” he says, blinking dumbly at the sight of Mimi all decked out on the other side of the door. She shoves past him with a laugh, leaving a scent in her wake of strawberries in the sun. (Mark is actually fairly certain that that’s actually the name of her shampoo, and also that they still might have the ass end of a bottle of it in their shower. He feels compelled to go look. Quells it forcibly.)

“Of course I’m here early, you dork. Angel said I could help set up!”

“I still don’t understand why this requires _setting up…_ ”

He trails after her reluctantly, socks sliding on the hardwood. Collins has the AC cranked up in the window and it’s rumbling noisily, but still vastly preferable to the face-melting heat Mark had woken up to this morning. He’s glad that it’s lukewarm enough in here to wear socks again; puttering around with his bare feet sticking sweatily to the hardwood is always an unpleasant experience. “And isn’t five people a bit _much?_ ”

“Hell no! When was the last time Roger held down a job for longer than two weeks?”

“Well... alright, you’ve got a point.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Roger flip them off from across the room. The black has almost completely chipped off of the nail. Mimi blows him a wet kiss and winks when he blinks and turns his head awkwardly away again, and Mark wills himself not to be jealous as he watches a pink flush crawl up the back of Roger’s neck.

“Uh... I don’t know if this is relevant, but Roger says he doesn’t _want_ a party,” he feels compelled to say, though it hasn’t done him any good thus far. Collins had ignored him entirely when he’d tried to tell him this, and Angel had made it her job to make it so fun that even Roger couldn’t stay a sourpuss all night. Mimi appears to be of the same opinion.

“Roger says he doesn’t want _most_ things that would be good for him.” She gives Mark a mystifyingly pointed look and flings her enormous leopard-print purse down carelessly onto their beat-up couch. “You, of all people, should know that.”

She looks gorgeous today in a pair of knee-high boots and a skirt that looks like it’s entirely made of lace; Mark can’t help his eyes from traveling up and down her body once, then a second time, guiltily. Mimi has been dressing uncharacteristically conservatively, lately, and it’s… nice, to see her back in something more familiar. More Mimi.

Also, that skirt makes her thighs look incredible. Sometimes Mark just remembers that he’s good friends with an erotic dancer, and marvels at how he got to this point in his life.

_Fucking hell, Cohen, can’t you keep it in your pants for ten seconds?_

But hey, it’s not like he would ever lay a hand on Mimi, especially when he’s got his suspicions that she’s got a new beau hidden away somewhere.

She clasps her hands behind her back in a stretch and slants a catlike smile at him.

“Come on Mark, you _know._ ”

“I guess,” he admits. He doesn’t, really. Somehow he’s staring at Roger again, even though he was staring at Mimi ten seconds ago. _How did that even happen?_ He can’t recall deciding to glance at him again, but now he can’t seem to look away. Roger’s twisting a pen cap around and around, thumb ring glinting in the afternoon sun, the bleach lingering at the ends of his hair illuminated brightly. Mark wants to fist his fingers in it and drag him down to his knees. He wants… he wants –

Mimi snorts, and the thought dies before it can make its way to the ever-growing X-rated corner of his brain.

“You’re hopeless, you know that?”

“What?” Mark snaps his eyes back to her, swallowing down his reactionary guilt.

_Wait, what? Why should I feel guilty?! If anyone’s being taken advantage of it’s me!_

He oscillates wildly on that one, actually. Some moments it seems clear to him that Roger was the instigator, and so all of this is his fault; other times, he becomes abruptly overwhelmed with sickening guilt, the paralyzing idea that he might have somehow, subconsciously manipulated Roger into pursuing him too powerful to ignore.

Today, though, Mark feels uncomfortably aware of how helpless he’s been to stop any of this. How he can’t even make himself _want_ to tell Roger “maybe this is a bad idea.”

He’s actually starting to wonder _why_ this seems like such a bad idea, which is even scarier.

“You two,” she says, gesturing between the two of them with far too much affection. “I saw it coming a mile away, but you’re both still playing dumb, aren’t you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Mark blusters. He knows that he’s losing, but words just keep falling out of his mouth, awkward and unconvincingly whiny. “I thought we already talked about this. It’s not Roger. I’m seeing Kelly.”

“Does anyone believe that?” Mimi wonders aloud.

“Well – she does!”

Okay, so she _does_ have a point… at least, she does where Mark’s concerned. Mark’s life is one continuous trainwreck of crushes that were never destined to be reciprocated. Not so much Roger, though. Right? Roger hasn’t been mooning over _him_ for years. That would be fucking absurd. Roger has had more gratuitous sex in his young life than Mark thinks he can ever hope to compete with – _if we keep this up maybe I’ll have a shot…_ \- and he’s had _no_ good reasons to sit around watching Mark out of the corners of his eyes the way Mark’s done to him for year, waiting for anything… a hitch of breath, a slight movement that lifts his shirt to reveal even just an inch of skin, the horrific temptation presented by the nights they’d spent near-naked in bed together, tipsy and exhausted and murmuring in the dark until they physically couldn’t keep their eyes open anymore.

He shakes his head distractedly, and Mimi rolls her eyes and sighs like she doesn’t know how she’s ever going to dredge up enough patience to deal with the two of them. Her attention is beginning to wander. Mark is obscenely grateful.

“If you say so!” She shrugs. Mark is not naïve enough to believe that she’s actually letting this go, but for now, he feels that he can let out the anxious breath he’s been holding. “By the way, you have sex hair.”

His face abruptly lights up red and Mimi can’t keep a laugh from bubbling out between her fingers.

“Oh my god, your face! I knew it! You probably got it three times already this morning!”

“I’d appreciate it if my friends could stop graphically speculating on my se- on my _hypothetical_ sex life,” Mark complains. He gingerly feels the back of his head and is mortified to realize that it is, indeed, sticking up at awkward angles near the nape of his neck.

 _Fucking Roger and his fucking hair-pulling fetish._ Mark shivers as the recent memory floats to the surface. It feels like it was moments ago, not hours.

_He could have at least said something._

“Suck it up, buttercup.” Mimi cups his face in a perfectly manicured hand and gives him a small, sweet kiss at the corner of his mouth. She pulls away with a smirk.

“No one cares. _I_ think it’s great. Besides… It’s sort of fun playing cockblock!” He chokes out half of a protest, and she ruffles his hair for good measure, unperturbed. “Don’t get your boxers in a bunch, Marky, you can get back to fucking him later.”

Before Mark even has time to compose properly indignant comeback, she peers around and spots Angel, who drops what she’s doing and catches her midair as she flings herself into her best friend’s arms.

“ANGEL BABY!” Mimi shrieks breathlessly.

“MIMI CHICA!” Angel laughs back.

Roger leans away from the noise with a groan. Collins wolf whistles when Angel lifts Mimi up and spins her around, her lacy skirt flying up and flashing them all a _little_ too much smooth, tan skin.

“London’s lookin’ good up there Meems!”

“So’s France,” Angel adds wickedly. Mimi squirms out of her arms, grinning and leaning her head on Angel’s chest.

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“Is that a _new_ piercing I see?”

Mimi flutters her eyelashes and

Everything was exactly as it should be, but Mark felt off-kilter and unfocused. _Anxious._ Mimi’s words should have been reassuring – hell, he knows that none of his friends would give half a shit if they knew he and Roger were hooking up, it’s not like it’s the first time their little group has mingled a little more-than-platonically – but instead they’re magnifying the unfounded dread that keeps appearing and disappearing randomly in the pit of his stomach throughout the day, lately.

Or maybe it’s not dread, exactly… He doesn’t know what to call it. Maybe ‘nervous anticipation’ would cover it, but he doesn’t like the sound of that. It almost feels like he _wants_ to be caught… and that’s not true at all! Mark hates scrutiny debatably _more_ than he hates feeling left out; and it’s a fine line sometimes, alright, hair-thin even… but not _that_ thin, surely?

That day in the shop, with Roger on his knees for the first time in front of him like it was nothing, springs eagerly to mind without prompting, and Mark has to force it down in a panic before it could make its way down to his dick, which has been half-hard most of the day anyway. The back of his neck prickles with nervous sweat. If any of his friends have secret telepathic powers, then they’re going to be getting a hell of a show tonight; Mark is well-aware that he’s a horny, giggly drunk, and he’s going to be having a hard enough time keeping his hands off of Roger without trying to keep the mental images in check at the same time.

He can feel his exact distance from Roger all the time like a second pulse, like they’re hooked up to an extension cord. He can’t wrap his mind around it.

_I don’t remember it being like this with Maureen._

Then again, fucking Maureen had been almost more trouble than it was worth.

Angel gasps and starts clapping rapidly, exclaiming about whatever it was that Mimi was flashing for her. “Ouch,” Collins hisses, and Mark averts his eyes from that corner of the room quickly to avoid being traumatized.

“Fucking” is, of course, still a bit of an overstatement in this case, but Mark likes the sound of it better than “fooling around”, which is what Collins kept calling it slyly under his breath and in passing. Roger still hasn’t fucked him. That’s… that’s fine. It’s totally fine. Mark likes to think of himself as a sex camel, in that he can subsist for years on nothing but his own hand and pornographic mental images collected throughout a regular day cavorting about the city. He _can,_ or he _could…_ It’s just, Roger’s got a libido that even Maureen would whistle at, and Mark’s has been repressed for so long that he feels like melting into a puddle of sexed out goo every time Roger starts eyeing him suggestively from across the room.

Either way, Mark isn’t an idiot. They haven’t been caught _in flagrante delicto_ – yet, anyway – but they certainly aren’t “fooling around”, considering that they apparently aren’t fooling _anyone_.

One of these days, Mark’s half-afraid he’s going to look out the bedroom window while Roger’s got his head bent, lapping at his balls, and see Maureen standing there on a cherrypicker with his camera in hand, smiling beatifically while she watched them go at it like they’re her favorite soap opera.

_And Mimi will probably be with her._

_That_ thought was more arousing than it should have been. Maureen, Mimi, hell, maybe even all of them huddled around watching Roger take him apart with nothing but his tongue and a few dirty words whispered in his ear… He can see it in his mind, how Maureen would grin wickedly and whisper to the others that Mark always _was_ a sucker for dirty talk. He’d be lost in his own little world, writhing under Roger’s diligent attentions – whimpering out things like “please” and “more” and “fuck me, fuck me, oh my God” – and then suddenly his friends would be standing there in the doorway jeering at them. Laughing at _Mark._  

_“Wow, Mark,” Mimi would mock breathlessly. “I never knew you were such a little cock slut.”_

He rubs his palms on the sides of his jeans again, uselessly. His palms aren’t going to stop sweating all night.

Uncomfortable with the direction his own thoughts have taken, Mark turns his attention back to the only person in the room who hasn’t cracked a joke at his expense yet today.

Roger, who is currently sitting on top of an overturned plastic pickle tub and moping for all he’s worth, doesn’t seem concerned about the teasing. Not that _he_ has anything to be self-conscious about, Mark thinks… He’s too busy acting tormented about the fact that his friends love him and want to celebrate his accomplishments to get worked up over the comments that Angel and Collins had been innocently tossing over their shoulders at the two of them all afternoon while they tried to make the loft seem festive, and somewhat habitable.

Mark tells himself sternly that getting annoyed will not solve anything. The innuendo he’s used to. Roger’s self-defeating attitude, even, he’s already resigned himself to dealing with for the rest of his natural born life.

On the other hand, they’re absolutely using this as an excuse to have a party.

 _Roger probably knows that,_ he admits to himself, watching him out of the corner of his eye while he picked at the notebook balanced on his knee and stared at the sparse words already there. He still feels a little bad about it though. They’re gathering tonight under the pretense of celebrating Roger’s recent success at not quitting or getting fired from his latest job, a feat that he hasn’t managed in nearly three years now. It’s not _really_ the point, though; in fact, it will probably be forgotten about entirely by the time they’re all staggering home at three in the morning.

It’s more the principle of the thing; Roger, former attention-whore, can’t _stand_ attention now that he doesn’t think he deserves it.

Angel has made a banner and tacked it up over the hall that leads back to the bedrooms, which Mark privately thinks is probably what got Roger brooding in the first place. “HAPPY 6 MONTHS NO INCIDENTS”. It’s pink and green and sheds glitter whenever anyone stomps a bit too hard on the floor. Everything about it is incredibly tacky – including the crocheted roses which have been pinned around the letters like little bouquets, with tiny metallic pieces of paper shaped like beer bottles at their centers (Mark can’t even begin to fathom how Angel managed to cut them out, but now he’s slightly jealous of her dexterity) – and Maureen is going to keel over and _die_ when she gets here out of sheer delight.

No doubt she’ll be commissioning Angel to make her costume for her next piece of performance art. Mark almost doesn’t want to know. He has a list of upcoming pieces handwritten in Maureen’s bubbly cursive magnetted to the side of the fridge which he’s been doing his damnedest not to closely examine since she stuck it there; if he gives himself time to try and puzzle them out, he’s only going to give himself a headache, and it will be like “Portrait of a Young Whale” all over again, except this time Maureen probably won’t let him slip out of the back half of the costume while she’s singing without a fight.

The other three have congregated in the corner around what Mark thinks must be a pile of tinsel. He doesn’t even bother to protest, and instead chooses to wander over to Roger’s side, twisting his hands behind his back as he leans over his head and peers at him upside-down.

Roger ignores him for a long moment, either because he’s chasing the thought that’s been eluding him or because he’s still playing at “cool and aloof”. Mark doesn’t know how to tell him that he can’t pull it off anymore (in all honesty, it’s been more than three years since Mark has been fooled by it at all) so instead he just studies him and his dark eyelashes for a moment, counting down the seconds until Roger breaks and finally gets self-conscious enough to acknowledge him.

Roger is chewing on his pen now.

“Whatcha writing?” he asks, forcing himself to sound chipper rather than constantly wracked with self-doubt. Roger doesn’t actually look like he’s writing, though. “Blocked again?”

Nothing. Aside from the wake-up sex this morning – which had been spontaneous and _mind-blowing_ and Mark is absolutely not complaining – Roger has been sort of avoiding him all day… at least, since people started showing up. Mark is beginning to feel a little bit like shit about it. He wonders if bothering Roger is even going to be worth it tonight, if Roger will even want to _look_ at him too affectionately in front of all of their rowdy friends.

But maybe he’s just being clingy. Again.

_I’ve really gotta cut that shit out._

“Roger.” He waits a moment. “Hey.”

Roger’s mouth twitches, but he still doesn’t reply. Mark raises an eyebrow.

“You’re going to bust that thing open,” he points out.

“Meh. Maybe I’ll get ink poisoning.” Roger flicks his eyes up at him and for a heart-stopping moment, Mark thinks that he’s about to be kissed.

He feels his eyes widen, and as quickly as it began, the moment comes to a screeching halt. Roger flips his notebook shut and sets it on the floor before Mark can even lean over and peek at what he’s got written today (probably nothing but doodles of dicks and flowers and flowers sprouting out of dicks; he’s been on a weird artistic kick lately.)

“D’you wanna go grab something to eat?” he asks, cool and casual, and Mark sincerely hates him for a moment. As is happening more and more often lately, the loft suddenly has a shimmery quality to it, warm and slightly warped – in a pleasant way, though. Like the night that Roger had pressed that tab onto the center of his tongue and blown him straight out of his monotonous life characterized alternately by sexual frustration and his own left hand, and into this weird little fantasy life he’s living now. His heart is still pounding so hard that his sternum is starting to hurt, and he’s hyperaware of every sound emanating from the room behind him – Mimi’s hysterical, wheezing attempts at catching her breath through her laughter, the distinct sounds of an upright tickle-scuffle, and Collins’ dramatic chanting as he eggs them on, no doubt being absolutely showered with glitter –

If they had looked, if they had seen, if Roger had kissed him right there in front of everyone with no excuse, no prank to blame it on –

What would Roger do?

 _What would_ I _do?_

It seems a little absurd that his brain has jumped from _casual friend sex_ all the way to _let’s out ourselves to all of our friends_ , and even stranger that it makes sense in his head to think of it as “outing” rather than “embarrassing the fuck out of himself”. His head is starting to hurt with all of the implications of that.

And Roger is just staring at him, eyebrows raised, waiting for an answer.

“I think Maureen is bringing food,” he hedges, watching longingly as Roger rubs the ball of his piercing along his lip and rolls his eyes.

“Yeah but it’s going to be some of that weird vegan shit she’s never actually made before. We’re better off tiding ourselves over now, before the smiling and nodding starts.”

Mark chews his lip and tries hard to ignore the curling heat in his stomach, which he’s not sure is entirely arousal. _Stop reading so much into it. Stop it. You’re only going to be disappointed._ But now that he’s considered it, it’s going to lurk there at the edges of his mind, tantalizing and almost-real. A sliver of pain waiting to happen. He glances at their friends, who are still horsing around in their living room and none-too-subtly leaving him and Roger to their private conversation.

Roger isn’t wrong, actually. Maureen is notorious for bringing eccentric dishes to pass the way that Collins is notorious for carrying enough marijuana on his person at all times to get them all sky high three times over.

“Well…” he begins uncertainly.

“They don’t need us,” Roger drawls, already standing and patting at his pockets. “I need to get smokes, anyway.” He takes a step toward the shoe pile by the door and looks over his shoulder at Mark, and the angle – the gorgeous rough bit of stubble darking his chin and his neck and sharpening the line of his nose, the cut of his jaw – takes Mark’s breath away for a moment. It feels like taking one step too far up and falling forward into thin air. Sometimes, the moments when things are exactly the same between them are even more jarring than the ones he never could have imagined happening.

It doesn’t help that he’s pretty sure he still has stubble burn on the insides of his thighs.

“You coming then?” Roger asks impatiently.

“I mean… Yeah. But.” There’s a moral dilemma somewhere buried beneath the blanket heat of Mark’s sex-frenzied mind. He gropes around for it, and comes up with nothing. That’s a little worrying. Leaving their friends alone in their apartment with Angel’s hot glue gun was, if not negligent, asking for _all kinds_ of trouble. God only knew what ideas Collins would get into his head, and without Mark to reason with him, they might very well come back and find all three of them naked and covered with paint, rolling around on a long sheet of easel paper.

Mark wishes that he could forget that particular incident sometimes. He thinks that the paper in question is still folded up and stuffed into the back of Collins’ old closet.

Roger is unamused by his distracted silence. “If you’re about to start lecturing me, save it. If I’m going to be stuck in a room with my drunk ex for eight hours then I’m going to need some fucking nicotine.”

Mark should stay right here. He’s very certain of that, suddenly. He needs a clear head. He needs a nap, or maybe a tall glass of ice cold water (which, sadly, is impossible, since their freezer hasn’t worked properly in months). Mark needs at least three months of free therapy, _not_ a long, hot walk bumping shoulders with the guy that he desperately wants to shove him up against the nearest flat surface and fuck him until his legs give out.

His fingers find the damned collar outlined against the outside of his thigh. Roger’s not looking at him to notice. Mark doesn’t know if he’s relieved or not.

“It’s not going to be that bad,” Mark sighs, and shoves his feet into his shoes defeatedly without unlacing them. Roger probably isn’t going to wait for him to go grab his camera before they leave. Mark stamps down his disappointment; if there was ever a time he needed to detach a little, it’s now. But that’s just his luck. “In case you’ve forgotten, I have to see my ex _and_ the person she left me for on a regular basis, and you don’t see me complaining.”

“That’s because Joanne can and will fucking murder you if you so much as raise an eyebrow at her,” Roger scoffs. So quickly that Mark doesn’t have time to lean out of the way, Roger runs past him and out the door, pinching his ass in passing. Mark sucks in a choked breath.

_Not! Fucking! Helpful!_

No one is paying attention to them, and Roger is already out the door and halfway down the stairs. Mark hops after him, tugging the backs of his shoes out one at a time. He barely remembers to slam the door shut behind him.

“ _Roger!_ Wait up, come on! Your legs are longer than mine!” he yelps.

Roger’s vindictive laughter floats up the stairs in a kaleidoscope echo, and Mark runs down, down, down chasing the sound of it.

* * *

 

“Okay!” Collins raised his arms over his head and clapped his hands sharply several times, beckoning everyone to pay attention to him. Angel winds her arms around him, leaning into him until he was bent nearly backwards over the counter, grinning. “I think it’s time we all settle down, children, and do some mother _fucking_ shots!”

A chorus of disjointed cheering and catcalling follows his words, most of it from Mimi and Angel – maybe the head start they’d gotten on the drinking front before Maureen and Joanne had even shown up had been a bad idea after all, although neither of them seem the least bit sorry.

It’s nine at night, and the sun has only just finally sunk below the horizon, leaving the stars blazing behind it. Collins has even managed to get the Boombox working again. Mark has managed to be good so far; he’s had a couple of mixed drinks, nothing too bad (Collins had gone easy on the liquor at his request, despite tutting and telling Mark that he needed to loosen up) and he’s only beginning to feel the first telltale warm tingles of drunkenness flowing down the length of his limbs. His hands have been extra twitchy tonight, bereft; the camera is set up on a tripod in the corner, a compromise he’d made with Roger to prevent him to clinging to it in the shadows all night, and there’s only so many times he can go over there and wind it up without starting to feel self-conscious.

(He doesn’t want to admit that that’s _probably_ the entire point.)

But he’s having fun. This is _good._ It usually is, when he lets himself take a deep breath and just enjoy the company, enjoy the booze, enjoy the laughter. The casual camaraderie of it all.

The fact that Angel and Mimi are also both still _here_ and very much alive is also probably helping buoy the mood. No one is going to say it out loud, though. It’s too fragile. Too… temporary.

Sometimes, Mark ponders that they don’t do this very often anymore because they all feel somewhat guilty, half-rationally, in some subconscious part of their minds that’s been brainwashed by capitalism, for wasting hours of their precious time gossiping and doing asinine things like playing drunken games of Strip Twister on Mark and Roger’s kitchen floor. Time has become such a horribly rare commodity now that they’re older. Mark can only begin to imagine how it feels for people like Collins, like Angel, like Roger and Mimi. His friends have it worse than him and he forces himself to think about it from time to time, a reminder to stop wallowing in his own feelings on the matter. Self-pity isn’t going to make his friends immortal. Life doesn’t feel like a game anymore, or a fun challenge to tackle; life is just life, and their lazy days of freedom have dwindled down until it’s gotten to the point where if they all want to get together like this, they have to plan it out months in advance and pray that they can get the time off of work without compromising the often precarious state of their bank accounts. It leaves Mark with the urge to reach out and grab at the air, as if he can bundle up this moment in time and just… save it. Tuck it all away in a box so that he can peek into it down the road and feel how he feels now, just for a few nostalgic moments.

He chews the inside of his cheek and resists the urge to sprint over to his camera and wind it up again compulsively.

There are so many other things they could, _should_ be doing… adult things, mature, sensible, _productive_ things. At least, that’s how _Mark_ feels about it – he somehow doubts that Collins has ever considered it more than in passing. He wishes that he could be like Collins, or even Maureen: belligerent and proactive. Able to take a stand. Doing something important.

But Mark can’t ever seem to finish anything. Mark’s just some suburban kid playing artist while his mom still sends him monthly care packages and begs him to come home. Mark’s just some wannabe with a camera. He doesn’t know how he can he possibly _avoid_ this feeling.

There’s groceries to get, and laundry to do, and appointments to try and remember. Appointments that could be life or death, if you’re someone like Roger… There’s medication to be picked up and paid for, even if you have to spend half an hour beforehand ransacking your own bedroom for change trying to come up with the last two dollars you need to get through another month without resorting to asking someone to lend it to you, knowing full well that you’re never going to be able to pay them back.

It seems like there’s just no _time_ in adulthood for friends –or for fun – which is why Mark misses this so fucking poignantly.

It’s also why he wishes he weren’t so _fucking distracted_ right now, but he supposes there’s no winning a battle with his own libido. Not with the object of his obsessive affections burning holes in his shirt from across the room.

Collins makes an excessively grand gesture with his hand, the other planted firmly on Angel’s back, kneading at it. Her lips are latched around his neck, smearing it with purple lipstick bright against the dark of his skin. “Miz Johnson?”

Maureen pulls two full bottles of what Mark can only assume is the same kind of vodka that had knocked her out on their living room floor several weeks ago from behind her back. Mimi shrieks with delight from the floor, where she’s been sprawled for the past ten minutes since she tried to jump on Roger’s back and missed by several crucial inches.

She’d gotten the damned plastic tiara on his head, though, which is all that counts.

“I bought the life,” Maureen sing-songs. She’s pretending not to notice Joanne beside her, rolling her eyes while her fiancée bends down and pours generous sloshes of sickly-sweet smelling liquid into the row of mismatched shot glasses that Collins has set out on the coffee table. “Now _you_ all have to bring the party.”

“Can do,” Collins promises. Mark can’t back away quickly enough to avoid having the largest glass of the lot shoved into his nervous, camera-less hands. “To Roger!”

“To Roger,” Joanne, Mark, and Angel chorus.

“Guys,” Roger groans, but he’s adjusting the tiara on his head so carefully that Mark knows he’s going to find it tucked away in a box in a few months, a rare happy memory. “Can we stop pretending this is about me and just get fucking plastered already?”

“Nope.”

“No, don’t think so.”

“Who says it’s not about you?”

“You’re all the fucking worst.” Roger grumbles, but he can’t keep himself from smiling when Angel peels herself away from Collins and sweeps him into a bear hug. She gives him a wet kiss on the cheek and now he’s purple, too.

“No swearing, you’re a fucking princess.” Angel pretends to smack him but she’s beaming, and when she pulls away Roger’s just a little more relaxed. “We love you, sweetie, so turn that frown upside down and just get used to it.”

If Mark had said that, Roger would have scoffed in his face, but when Angel says cheesy shit like that it’s hard to argue, so Mark can’t even find it in him to be jealous when Roger mumbles his assent. It’s impossible to stay sullen in Angel’s presence. Especially when she’s covered in pink glitter and strutting around in heels that Mark thinks he’d probably take one step and die in.

He and Roger exchange a glance, and both look away, flustered. Clearly they’re thinking the same thing.

“Princess, ooooooh… I like the sound of that.” Collins cocks his head, eyes gleaming with dastardly interest. He looks Roger up and down critically for a moment. “Think we should dress him up sometime, Ang?”

“I think that could be arranged!”

“Please do,” Maureen begs, momentarily distracted with the opened bottle in hand. “I’ll pay you real money to stick him in a dress.”

“I didn’t consent to this,” Roger says uselessly.

Mark tries to imagine it, which turns out to be a mistake. He’s been good but apparently not good enough… Alcohol has an unfortunate effect on both his sex drive and his imagination. Now that he’s thought of it once it’s going to be hard to get the mental image of Roger lifting his petticoat to show Mark his dick encased in gilded, lacy lingerie _out_ of his brain.

“More,” Mimi simpers, holding up her glass and wiggling it until Maureen takes it and replaces it with a cup. She dumps the shot into it and pours until it’s nearly full. Mark had never met anyone who could literally sip vodka like water until he met Mimi. “Come on, miss histrionic! The room’s not even spinning yet!”

“I’m shocked that you can even pronounce that word right now,” Roger drawls. Collins and Angel are engrossed in a brainstorming session for Roger’s future gown. Mark is trying not to listen, mostly because if he does he’s afraid he’ll start making suggestions. His eyes keep straying to Roger’s collarbones; fuck, he can just picture how edible they’d look framed by a sweetheart cut neckline. _Oh my god,_ he thinks in dismay. _Have I actually been paying attention when Maureen speaks? She’s ruined me._

Mimi hugs her glass close to her chest and very maturely sticks her tongue out at him. Roger makes a face and sticks his out in turn, the metal shining temptingly.

 _Wow,_ Mark thinks distractedly. _That was on my dick less than 24 hours ago._

A minute of chaotic squabbling later, Maureen calls everyone’s attention back to the center of the kitchen where she has Joanne twined around her like an octopus. “HEY!” she calls, effectively cutting through the clamor. Her big mouth definitely comes in handy sometimes. “Guys, focus! Is everyone ready to get fucked up?”

The cheering begins again, and this time even Roger seems mellow enough to be interested. All around him, Mark’s friends are raising their now-full shotglasses.

He looks down at his own warily. _Do I drink and save myself the embarrassment?_ he wonders. _Or can I get away with just a wine cooler?_

There _were_ wine coolers, courtesy of Joanne, but Mark thinks they’re probably all gone by now. He peers around in search of the box.

“Drink up, vampire boy! Or you won’t get participation points,” Collins croons, curling a finger at him lewdly. Against his better judgment, Mark steps closer hesitantly. The way Roger’s eyes slant toward the point of contact when Collins pokes Mark in the fading bruises trailed around his neck makes goosebumps rise on Mark’s forearms.

Apparently, Roger has forgotten about being aloof, because for the past hour he’s done nothing but give Mark the _Look_. (Which is both extremely unhelpful and also a little rude, in Mark’s opinion, since they can’t do anything about all of this sexual tension until _later.)_ His eyes are dark and heavy where they linger. The atmosphere of the loft is already getting thicker and more difficult to breathe than Mark could have anticipated, and it has nothing to do with the air conditioning; watching Roger watching him is a bad idea.

“I told you,” Mark says unconvincingly. “That new waitress at the Life is into some kinky shit.”

“Oh, shut _up_ , Mark,” Mimi scoffs. Her censor’s been completely drowned in alcohol, and will presumably be missing for the rest of the night and well into the morning. “Kelly’s a huge fucking lesbian.”

“I –” Mark starts to protest, but he shuts it when he realizes that he doesn’t have a leg to stand on. _Is she really? Damn it, I should have asked._

Mimi laughs triumphantly.

Roger says nothing, but Mark gets the distinct feeling – even from across the room, somehow – that he’s annoyed.

“On three!” Maureen has apparently gotten sick of the attention straying from her again. She lifts her shot into the air, and everyone else follows suit. Mimi is sitting up now, still on the floor – she’s holding herself up by the couch, right below Roger who’s perched on the back of it – and Joanne has gravitated towards Mark, most likely sensing that he is, aside from her, the soberest, most sensible person left in the room.

“One!”

 _Not after I take this shot, I won’t be._ He’s trying not to think about all of the spiraling this night might do once he’s well and truly hammered. Joanne looks like she’s thinking the same thing.

Mark doesn’t even want to _think_ about dragging himself out of bed tomorrow afternoon in time for work. What he does want to think about can be summarized in two words, and several excellent screwdrivers into the evening he still can’t shove the lingering arousal the rest of the way to the back of his mind.

“Twooooo…”

He tears his eyes away and lifts the shot weakly. _There’s no way that Roger feels that way about me, though. Even if he does think I’m a decent fuck._

The tantalizing image of Roger pulling him down into a kiss for everyone to see from earlier suddenly seems like a pitiful, hollow daydream, the type that he used to spend hours huddling in when Roger was in Santa Fe. In fact, Roger has done little else but look at him all night long. He hasn’t so much as ruffled his hair since the whole group got together tonight, and Mark is beginning to wonder if he hallucinated having his ass grabbed earlier on the way out the door. The almost-kiss keeps circling its way back to the forefront, too, begging the question… is Roger ashamed of what they’re doing? Is that why he doesn’t want anyone to know?

 _Maybe he_ does _regret this…_

The smell of the shot in his hand barely even registers; all Mark can taste is bile, even though he’s pretty sure he’s imagining it. He knows, rationally, that this line of thinking is unproductive, and he’s being a hypocrite again; after all, he and Roger have been sneaking around for weeks now by silent, mutual agreement that they don’t want to have to explain themselves to their nosy friends and exes. It’s not like Mark hasn’t been doing his part to deflect attention. Puking would really suck right now, though. Roger’s definitely not going to want to cuddle up with him and kiss away his panic attack later if he’s got gross sub-and-strawberry-vodka vomit breath.

Mark shakes his head to clear it. He feels a little fuzzy, a little off-balance still, and horribly, achingly, unendingly horny. There’s just no way around it. He’s going to spend the rest of this affair with Roger alternately panicking over minute details, and jerking himself raw in the bathroom.

That actually sounds vastly preferable than doing shots that he knows he shouldn’t take. Now he’s seriously considering trying to sneak off alone.

“THREE!” Maureen yells, taking her shot with an overly-dramatic tit grab that Joanne doesn’t even attempt to swat away. “Bottoms up!”

Mark can feel her eyeing him already. Collins, too. He takes a steadying breath.

“Wouldn’t want to flunk out of drinking school,” he mumbles, and knocks it back.

He manages to swallow half of it. The other half is split between the cup (both the inside and the outside of it) and the front of his shirt, which is going to smell like liquor for the rest of his life now. “That’s _so bad_ ,” he gasps, struggling not to retch.  He watches through the tears springing to his eyes at the burning sensation as everyone else – everyone but Joanne, who always seems immune to their peer pressures – downs theirs without incident.

Joanne is handing him a wet rag already. She’s struggling not to laugh, and although she’s doing an admirable job, Mark still has to tear his eyes away from her in embarrassment.

“Don’t feel bad,” she whispers. The others’ voices are already escalating, drowning the two of them out and leaving them in a nice, safe little bubble of privacy for a moment while Mark recuperates. “I won’t even do shots with Maureen anymore. Not since the time I had to show up to my parents’ vow renewal with half a bottle of Absolut in me.”

“I’ve never really liked doing shots much anyway,” Mark admits, wiping his cheeks with the palm of his hand for good measure. He takes his time rubbing the cloth between his fingers, cheeks burning with the idea that Roger might still be watching him from across the room still… tracking the movements of his fingers, his lips, his – God, he can’t even continue that line of thought. It doesn’t matter, anyway; if this is all superficial, he might just have to put his foot down and end it before Roger gets bored of him. “It seems… unnecessary. But at least she gets the good stuff, right?”

Joanne snorts. “Yeah, when she can find it. She’s not _that_ picky, though. Sometimes I come home and she’s drinking the rest of three different bottles from the back of the fridge.”

Mark shudders just to think about it. He _does_ remember that about Maureen, now that he thinks about it. “She’s not _human._ ”

“I have my doubts.” Joanne shrugs, twisting around to lean against the wall and swirl her un-drunk shot around in the glass. The pungent scent of it is abruptly starting to make Mark queasy, but saying so would require more self-assuredness than he’s ever possessed in his life.

Joanne would not be Joanne if she didn’t notice, though, and she does. She smiles wryly and holds it away from him. “What’s on your mind, hm? I know that look.”

“Besides the fact that I already want to brush my teeth?” Mark grimaces and tips his head back, trying to focus on the sounds of his friends goading each other in the background rather than the increasing volume of his own thoughts. “I don’t know. Nothing.” The skeptical look that she gives him makes him grin despite himself, just a small one. “Okay, everything.”

“Does it have to do with your… thing, with…” An awkward gesture with the shot glass in Roger’s direction. Mark’s eyes follow the line of sight helplessly. His arousal, half-forgotten, is already on its way to being fully restored and there’s not a thing he can do about it. The night is still young. He’s been hard on and off half the day, and the walk had only made things ten times worse, not least because Roger’s hand had brushed against his half a dozen times – so often that Mark almost began hallucinating and reading intent into it that clearly was not there, and Roger had just obliviously kept talking, on and on complaining about the heat, about Mimi, and then about how much he wishes he could be like Mark, who never seems to mind being around Maureen the same way, and Mark doesn’t know how to explain to him that it’s _different_ because the whole time he’d been chasing after Maureen, he’d had Roger there at the back of his mind like some kind of sex fungus that was only now beginning to take over, having grown all around his brain stem while he wasn’t paying attention – and divulging that to Joanne would be disastrous, all of her good intentions aside.

“I guess.” He rubs a hand over his face, and she drops the issue.

“I was sick of this song two days after it came out,” she groans instead, and Mark tunes in just in time to hear Mimi and Angel putting on their deepest, manliest voices in an off-key rendition of _I’m Too Sexy._ He laughs.

See, _that’s_ what Mark likes about Joanne. She knows the value of privacy. She gets it; it’s like they’ve got some psychic connection for both having survived dating Maureen.

Speaking of Maureen, Mark hears a screech and realizes in slow-motion that he let his guard down just a second too long.

“Pooooookie!” Maureen sings, falling halfway into his arms and half into Joanne’s. The catch her awkwardly and haul her back to her feet while she plays dead weight, giggling so hard that she snorts, and that only makes her laugh harder. Her boobs are five seconds away from falling right out of the plunging neckline of her top. Joanne’s attention is now firmly fixed there, and Mark knows he’s been abandoned. “Mark, Mark, Mark. You look _famished,_ why don’t you go try one of my spring rolls?”

Joanne is shaking her head violently behind Maureen’s back; she goes still and plasters on a smile when Maureen turns to give her a kiss. Mark tries to smile, too, but he can’t stop tasting liquor behind his teeth and it’s souring his stomach.

“Uh, I don’t… think that’s a good idea. Maybe when I’ve cleansed my palette a little…” There is no way, no way in hell that he’s eating anything off of the platter Maureen had brought – nor will most of the others if they know what’s good for their health – but Maureen doesn’t need to know that. Eventually Collins will break out the weed, and then he’ll eat whatever is closest to him. Good old Collins… He was always ready to take one for the team.

“Marky,” Maureen pouts. “I got the recipe from your sister! Did you know Cindy’s been a vegetarian for three years?” Mark blinks, trying to process the unsettling fact that Maureen and his sister may have talked extensively at _any_ point in his life, but before he can say anything about it Maureen is twisting around, which Mark knows means that this conversation is already headed downhill at breakneck speed.

“ _Roger!_ Tell your boyfriend he’s not getting laid unless he tells me my food is tasty!”

Joanne shoots Mark an apologetic look. He rubs the rag against his mouth until it feels raw, clenching his jaw to keep back the flood of rude retorts that spring to mind.

“He has to work in the morning, you know. Some people can’t afford to have food poisoning,” comes the sharp retort. Roger’s voice startles him, too close – Mark turns around and nearly jumps out of his skin when he realizes he’s no longer sitting on the back of the couch with his legs dangling over the side (where he’d been since Mimi’s attempted assault). Now, he’s sidled up to hover at Mark’s side, the way that Mark used to do when Roger took him to after-parties. The look he’s giving him, though, does not say _please take me home,_ the way Mark’s used to. Instead, the way he cocks his head and looks at Mark rather than Maureen while he speaks strikes Mark as more _I could fuck you right here, and you’d love every second of it._

Mark shivers with anticipation. It’s barely been twenty minutes since Mark had last told himself that he wasn’t an exhibitionist, but he’s starting to revise his opinion on that already.

“Ha ha,” Maureen snaps. Her eyeliner is smeared at the corner of her right eye. Mark tries to focus on that, and not the way his pants are strangling his suddenly full cock. “You’re just mad that he’s going to be too wasted to ride your dick tonight.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” Roger snaps.

Maureen sniffs. “What? It’s true.”

“Actually, I’ve got a girlfriend,” Mark tries once more, but when Roger shoots him an unwarranted glare he shuts his mouth. “Um.”

“Give it up, honey, we’re all friends here,” Angel slurs out from Collins’ shoulder.

Mark wants to die. He really, truly, in every possible way, wants to die right there, and not have to see the way that Roger’s face twists up in disgust at the very thought of fucking him. _I knew it, I knew it, I fucking knew it. It’s all been too good to be true._

That everyone is apparently listening in on his humiliation is just the icing on the fucking cake.

“You can’t just say things like that!” Joanne hisses, hand clamping around her fiancée’s bicep in warning, but Maureen shakes her off with a hurt frown.

“It was a _joke,_ calm down. I’m not trying to – oh, God, I made it awkward didn’t I. It really was a joke…” She looks around for backup, only to find that everyone within earshot – which is everyone, really – is wincing. To her credit, she looks genuinely dismayed. She usually does. Maureen’s mouth is a lot bigger than she realizes, but so is her capacity for empathy. “Mark?”

She turns toward him earnestly, and Mark has a crystalline moment of absolute clarity in which he realizes that he _cannot_ listen to her apologize. He turns away and yanks the cupboard open, grabs a random plastic cup out of it, and steps around Joanne toward the hallway. The Twister mat on the floor crinkles when he walks across it.

“I’m actually, uh. Not feeling good,” he says, without much effort to sound convincing. “I think I’m going to go get some water and lie down.”

“I’m sorry about her,” Joanne says guiltily. “She’s drunk.”

“I’m not _drunk,_ pookie, I’m just having fun. Jeez.”

Mark keeps walking. If he stops, he’s just going to get dragged back into this mess of a conversation, and he really – _really_ – needs a minute right now to just… collect himself.

“Mark! Don’t be mad!” Maureen calls after him, pleading. “You can come back, I’ll be nice.”

He glances back over his shoulder despite himself. Maureen’s shirt has been pulled crooked, and Joanne is physically restraining her from following him with her arms around her waist. Roger is still glaring her down like he wants to brain her with his guitar. It looks kind of funny, with the tiara slipping down his hair in the front, but Mark can’t fully appreciate the hilarity of it all right now. Hopefully twenty minutes of muted darkness in a closed room will restore his ability to think straight, and not with his dick.

He doesn’t even pause to take his camera gingerly from its stand as he flees – a bit of personal progress that he can’t even appreciate right now.

 _I’m not mad,_ he wants to say, _it’s no big deal,_ but it gets lost amongst the rest of the pent up words inside his head.

Maybe it _is_ a big deal. Maybe it was always a big deal. Maybe Roger gleaning that Mark wants to be fucked is a huge fucking deal, and his reaction is now going to be paramount to Mark’s emotional state for the rest of his godforsaken life. Maybe Mark’s just a huge fucking pushover.

He takes a deep, shuddering breath as he passes the darkened bathroom. In an abstract way, he wishes that he’d just taken his earlier idea and run with it.

Maybe Mark just really, really needs to get off.

* * *

 

_In, out. In… and out…_

The bedroom is an oasis, in a way that it hasn’t been since long before Mark found himself constantly preoccupied with thoughts like _I wish Roger would choke me with this collar and fuck my ass so raw I won’t be able to fucking breathe through the tears._

That he has thoughts like that at all is still jarring. New, and he doesn’t know what to do with them yet. Or if he’ll ever be brave or reckless enough to chase any of them at all.

Maureen’s little “jokes” still buzzed around in his head like infuriating gnats. Like the fruit flies constantly hovering over the produce on their counter, which Roger always said he would get around to eating and then just let it rot for weeks. Mark can’t decide what about her words had him so bothered, though – is he just sick of her interfering in his sex life, now that he actually has one again? Or is he upset that she isn’t _right?_

Mark can’t deny it anymore: he’s fucking dying for Roger’s cock. He thinks about how Roger would groan while he pushed inside of him, and how he’d push his hips back against it eagerly even if it hurt, and he can hardly breathe through the haze of desire. Seeing as he’s spent the last few months pondering exactly how big and how much and how hot it would be to have Roger inside him, Mark doesn’t really understand why it seems so goddamn imperative now. It should be old news, the dog-eared kind of fantasy that’s soft at the edges from the number of times he’s revisited it, so that he has to struggle to think up new details every time just to keep it interesting. (The inspiration _is_ endless now, however.)

But it _is_ important. It is.

There has to be a way to compromise this. To somehow clamp down on the urge to get down on his knees and _beg_ in every way he knows how just to get Roger to consider maybe possibly taking the risk and plowing him over the back of the couch.

 _Fucking hell, I need to stop_ thinking _about it._

Discreetly jerking off is now clearly out of the question. If he gives in he’s never going to be able to walk back out there looking normal and not like he’s obsessing over the shape of Roger’s lips when they’re parted on a moan.

Mark takes stock of the room helplessly and rubs his sweaty palms on his pants again, pausing when he feels the ever-present bump in his pocket.

He draws the collar out of his pocket like he used to do with the lucky rabbit’s foot he brought to school with him every day when he was ten (before he knew that it was a _real_ rabbit’s foot, just dyed green, and then cried so hard that his mother had called him in sick and thrown the unfortunate thing in the trash compactor.) It’s the same motion, too; a smooth, quick slip of the hand and then hefting it in his palm, running his thumb over the little ridges. Just feeling. Some part of him hopes that the soothing effect this thing is coming to have for him will kick in and somehow – (perhaps contradictorily, considering that finding this thing on their living room floor is what started the clusterfuck of _maybe if_ s and _it could happen_ s currently cluttering Mark’s normally mostly rational mind with their insidious ) – help distract him from the sexual turmoil he’s been fighting valiantly all night.

And losing.

Mark’s bedroom used to belong to Maureen, back when all of them lived here and nothing was this complicated. (Back then, wanting Roger to fuck him was an unattainable dream because Roger was ridiculously, pretentiously _hot,_ not because life had beaten him down into a paranoid, guilt-ridden wreck.) If Mark tilts his head a certain way and blurs his eyes he can imagine the walls still covered in paper: Broadway posters, many of them signed by their respective casts, flyers for her own protests, postcards from her many pen pals and her parents, and Mark’s mother, who just kept sending them no matter how many unsubtle hints Mark gave her that he didn’t have anywhere to put them. Things had fallen apart around him, largely out of his control, and Collins had left – April had died – Roger had fallen facefirst into depression, slipped into withdrawal, practically catatonic – Maureen had moved out one day when Mark was at work, and the walls had looked so bare, so fucking lonely.

He's had a lot of sex in this room, though, between Maureen and Roger. Really incredible sex.

Wait! He’s supposed to be distracting himself, not reminiscing! Sinking gingerly to the edge of the bed, he massages his temples and hunches over his lap. Tries to think of unwashed socks and moldy bread, and getting kneed in the crotch by his sister’s little bastard kids. Anything else. Anything.

“Hey- Mark?” Roger calls quietly from behind the door.

_Shit._

Mark groans. Just his _luck_. He can’t help it; his dick is throbbing unbearably and no amount of frustrated rubbing at the front of his pants with the heel of his hand will fix it. He’s fucking _obsessed._

“Yeah?” he manages, just barely managing to keep his voice steady.

Roger cracks the door open and peeks into the bedroom, for once not barging in immediately. He’s a little drunk – Mark can tell from the way he’s shifting from foot to foot, slow and lazy and unnaturally smooth, and the slick way that he keeps poking his piercing out between his lips and sliding it along the lower one before sucking it back into his mouth. The scowl he’d fixed on Maureen is gone completely; Mark likes Roger’s face better like this, relaxed and open.

“You okay?” he asks, not quite softly but the intent is there. Mark clears his throat and shrugs, shoving the collar back into his pocket self-consciously.

He doesn’t know what he can say. The obvious answer is to lie. “I’m fine. Just feeling it a little. I guess I should have eaten more at lunch.”

“You had an entire sub and fries,” Roger points out, already frowning ominously. Mark instinctively wants to plaster his back to the wall. Roger hates _fake_ more than he likes to pet and placate Mark when he needs comforting. He hesitates before adding, “Mark, don’t let Maureen ruin this. She’s just got a big fucking mouth. We can ignore her, we’ve done it before.”

“She’s better at ignoring me than the other way around,” Mark mutters.

Roger cracks the door open a bit wider and slips inside before closing it quickly behind him, the click nearly silent in the stuffy heat. The air conditioning doesn’t really reach either of the bedrooms when it’s set up in the living area, so they normally have it in one of their windows – usually Mark’s – but tonight, all things considered, Mark had assumed he’d just have to sleep in the living room or suffer through it. Now he’s second guessing himself a bit. The heat seems to rise several degrees with every step Roger takes toward him; Mark feels his thigh muscles begin to tighten up with anticipation, and wipes his sweaty palms on the sides of his pants before Roger can notice them and decide that Mark’s too repulsive to fuck.

_Fuck, please, please, I need you to fuck me –_

He shudders and mentally slaps the fantasy away, but it lingers there anyway. Almost-real, unreachable.

“I don’t care,” Roger says, awkward and hovering just a hair too close to be entirely well-intentioned. His eyes are trailing down Mark’s front, from the loosened collar of his striped polo and down over his stomach, which is currently twisted up in a thousand fucking knots of pure arousal. “I mean, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“You don’t care about what?” Mark can’t keep his heart from stopping, listening to the next words with increasing fragility. This is it. The truth comes out. “This? The- the sex stuff? The shit we’ve been –?”

“No!” Roger gives a frustrated huff and flicks the hair out of his eyes. He really needs a haircut, in a way that Mark almost hopes that he doesn’t get one. It’s perfect pulling-length. “I meant _Maureen._ And the rest of our jackass friends. You don’t have to _make shit up_ to appease them, Mark, Jesus Christ. I’m not going to stop wanting _this –”_ He takes another step closer and leans over him, trails his fingers down his sides, drawing an involuntary shiver down Mark’s spine and smirking triumphantly. Honestly, Mark is too distracted by the fact that Roger really _is_ bothered by his pathetic attempts at making up a girlfriend to protest. “Just because they’re talking shit.”

“It’s private, though,” Mark says, halfheartedly standing. If Roger is bothered, does that mean he’s _jealous?_ Or is it just Maureen that’s making him pissy? Roger and Maureen have never gotten along well for long periods of time. The tension is so close to breaking that he feels like he should be holding his breath to keep from falling to his knees and giving into temptation.

Roger looks like he could really use a wet mouth around his dick right now…

 _All of your closest friends are ten feet away,_ his brain screams. _Don’t you fucking dare!_

“It’s _sex_!” Roger laughs, incredulous, and licks his lips again (it has to be deliberate this time, has to be. Mark glares.) “Since when are any of us private about our sex lives?”

“ _Joanne_ doesn’t like to talk about her sex life.”

“Maybe she just knows that we’ve already heard all of the dirty details from her fiancée,” Roger snorts. His hands remain splayed on Mark’s hips. Mark imagines him digging those fingers in and backing him up into the bed, imagines falling backwards onto the mattress, the way the air would be knocked out of his lungs, the way he’d whimper when Roger slid them down to his thighs and spread them apart –

“It’s just weird,” Mark says dazedly, and no, he’s not panting. _Yet._ “I don’t make a habit of bragging about my sex life to anyone.”

He’s beginning to have a horrible realization, and he wonders how he hadn’t seen it. So much wasted time. Days. Weeks. Countless anxiety attacks, the subsequent spiraling into bouts of midnight depression that couldn’t quite be dispelled even by Roger’s sleepy, seeking lips and limbs. So many _fucking_ hours spent agonizing over Roger’s uncharacteristically tight lips, and yet he’d _never_ stopped to consider that maybe Roger was just trying to be considerate to _him._

Mark’s resolve is suddenly crumbling.

Rapidly.

“I think there’s plenty to brag about, though,” Roger purrs. He shifts and presses a leg between Mark’s legs, his thigh hitching up against his front and _oh,_ oh Lord, that gorgeous friction… Mark grabs his shoulders, white-knuckled. “You don’t want to tell Maureen all about how I swallowed your cock this morning?”

Roger’s soft-rough-honey voice is always Mark’s undoing. His eyes flutter shut on the beginnings of a moan. “You’re such a bastard.”

“I try.” Roger noses along the column of his neck. The prickling awareness of the fact that any one of their drunk friends could come careening through the door any moment is starting to make Mark’s scalp hurt, and Roger’s barely even started. He can’t bring himself to push him away, though. Belatedly, with a rush of light-headedness that’s probably half-vodka and half-resurging arousal, he remembers that _he’s_ a little drunk, too. _Please…_ “Seriously… why are you hiding?” Roger whispers against the shell of his ear. He’s toying with Mark’s waistband.

Mark screws up every ounce of self-control he has and gets out, “I needed some air.” And then, before he can stop it from whooshing out on the same breath, “Fuck me.”

Roger bites down on his pulse point lightly. Mark squeaks. “Can’t,” he says, without any of the dramatic, hand-wringing guilt that Mark had imagined, and then he’s sucking a fresh bruise on top of an old one, knuckles tightening around his waist as if he’d ever try to run away from this. “Can probably take care of this, though.”

Guitar callouses are becoming wonderfully familiar to Mark’s aching cock. He bucks his hips up into the circle of Roger’s fist helplessly as he slips his hand down the front of Mark’s boxers. Somehow, he’s already gotten Mark’s pants unbuttoned and shoved down to his knees, a talent of his which Mark still can’t figure out the trick to. _It’s that fucking piercing,_ he thinks wildly, lust seeping up in the cracks Roger is chiseling in his composure as he fists his fingers in the sides of Roger’s t-shirt. _Distracting._ Roger’s piercing is currently caressing the new bruise swelling up on his neck, warm and slick from his mouth. Mark whines. That hand is moving in slow, uneven pumps, and he can’t keep track of where he’s being guided, letting Roger push and pull him wherever he wants.

He should let it go. He knows he should, but he’s drunk, too, a little, and the dam’s already been broken, and it just seems like he might as well crack it open a little wider, spill out some of what he’s been holding back. He leans heavily against Roger’s chest, fingers still clinging, twitching with need. “Fuck, Roger, I really – really want it.”

“Want what?” Roger breathes. He likes the way the hair stands up on Mark’s neck when he does that, he told him once.

Mark thinks that Roger just likes to push him, and push him, and _push_ him until he begs for it.

Scratch that – he _knows_ that Roger likes to make him beg. But fuck it, he can’t find his dignity right now. He’ll fucking beg if he has to. It’s not like he really has anything to lose, at this point, right? Still berating himself for every second he’d spent on doubt, on internal drama, he chokes out the words he’s wanted to say the most.

“Want you to fuck me. Please. Please, Rog.”

There’s a beat of silence, long enough that Mark’s anxiety rears its head even through the muddle of alcohol and constricts his lungs. Roger doesn’t stop, though, just tightens his grip and pulls back to squint at Mark in the dim light.

It was only less than a week ago, Mark thinks with dismay, that Roger had finally gotten over his hangups about _blowjobs_. Who the fuck says no to a blowjob? Mark is an idiot. He shouldn’t have fucking said anything, he should have just _known_ what the answer would be – he should have just fucking respected Roger’s boundaries, God, this is awful, he’s fucking awful, Roger is never going to want to touch him again after –

Roger kisses him, and Mark’s rambling mind takes a sudden, very colorful detour.

It would stand to reason that Mark would have gotten used to this by now, but no; Roger kisses like he does it professionally. Mark is not convinced that Roger has never dabbled in porn, because he has a system – he likely thinks Mark doesn’t notice, but Mark is an obsessive fuck, and he does. He does. And even though he knows exactly how it will go, it still always w _orks._ First, Roger will take hold of his face and draw him in, press their lips together firm and hot and with just the faintest tease of tongue. Then he retreats. Always. He treats Mark’s mouth like a temple he’s planning to desecrate, scoping it out, nosing and brushing along his jaw and his neck and the lobe of his ear, beneath it, lips finding every unlikely nerve ending that Mark had never even considered before, and everything above his shoulders (and certain parts of him below them) is suddenly oversensitive and supercharged with _want._

Mark has never wanted something as simple as a kiss so fucking badly; Roger knows exactly how to lead up to it, slides his fingers around Mark’s hips so suavely in the midst of tonguing his lower lip that Mark can’t even find the words in his head to make fun of how goddamn clichéd it is.

Truthfully, a lot of Roger’s “moves” are the best known clichés… which is good for reminding Mark that clichés are sometimes popular for _very_ _good_ reasons.

“I can’t,” Roger says, and wow, he really does smell like alcohol this close. The regret in his tone is so faint it’s almost lost in the increasing rapidity of Mark’s desperate panting. He squeezes the base of his cock and rubs his thumb there at the underside, almost like an apology. But before Mark can even get his mouth open Roger is walking him toward the door.

Mark’s first instinct is to dig his heels in and dash back toward the bed, and safety, but his dick is calling the shots right now and it’s currently being fondled so thoroughly that his knees are quaking. Or maybe these are the aftershocks from the kiss, he can never tell. He whines quietly, half-through his nose. “Wh- wait, where- what are you doing?”

Roger’s eyes are dark and intense, the green almost swallowed up by the velvet black of his pupils. “Making up for it.”

 _Making up for it?_ A ripple of adrenaline radiates from his gut and Mark isn’t sure, for a moment, if he even cares if anyone hears them.

Mark’s bedroom sans-Maureen never used to be this cluttered, but Roger has been all but living in here for the past few weeks, and the floor is slowly being swallowed up by laundry that may or may not be dirty and mostly-empty bags of Roger’s favorite chips. And condom wrappers. _So many condom wrappers._ There’s another thing for Mark to be mortified about, if anyone were to walk in on them right now – which feels like a distinct possibility, considering how he’d left things out there. He steps on three of them in the ten seconds that he’s being manhandled up against the dresser beside the door, but the crinkling is drowned out by the sound of the breath that’s knocked out of him when Roger shoves him into it and bends him practically in half.

“Oh, fuck,” he pants, throwing a hand out to make sure that the door really is clicked shut. Roger bends over him until their bodies are pressed tight together from chest to knees, and Mark starts to get the idea. “We have to be quiet. I, I have to be quiet, shitohfuckRogerplease –”

“You’re right, you should probably try to keep it down,” Roger says conversationally, and drags his thumbnail lightly beneath the head of Mark’s cock.

“F- _uck_.” Mark feels his throat close up briefly from sheer pleasure, and his forehead thunks against the wall, knuckles white around the edge of it. There’s a hand caressing his ass, for a long moment, squeezing firmly and rubbing at it, softly but with intent, like a precious thing. Mark’s cheeks erupt into redness at the thought. He can feel Roger’s answering grin in the heat ghosting over the back of his neck – _of course he noticed, when doesn’t he notice?_ – and then there’s the distinct pop of a plastic cap opening and one of Roger’s hands, the one that had been squeezing his ass like it was his property, abruptly disappears.

Mark thinks his heart is going to jump up his throat and out of his fucking mouth. For a tantalizing, terrifying moment, he almost thinks that Roger has miraculously changed his mind.

Roger’s other hand briefly disappears as well (this one, Mark is a little bit more devastated about – or at least his cock is) and Mark instinctively takes his hand from the wall, intending to push himself back up. A hard smack to his ass jolts him forward and right back into position.

“Hhh,” Mark groans, curling his toes against the sting of it.

Roger yanks his boxers down and he widens his stance instinctively as they slide down to tangle around his ankles with his pants.

“Stay still,” Roger murmurs, low and dangerous. “I’ve got you.” Mark can’t take much more of that voice. The air feels thick and charged and it’s too easy to pretend that they’re here for something else, something more; Mark feels horribly, alluringly exposed, with his cock hanging full and flushed between his legs and Roger’s fingers sliding down wetly to tease at his hole.

This is dizzyingly close to being everything he’s dreamed about, gagged about, jerked off about for _fucking years._ Mark is scared to say anything that might ruin it, but he can’t shut his filthy fucking mouth. The alcohol probably isn’t helping. “Oh, God, please don’t let this be a dream –”

Roger’s lips rest on the back of his shoulder for a moment, soothing while he presses his pointer finger slowly, slowly in. He’s a few inches taller than Mark, but except in moments like this, Mark always forgets about it. “Hope this is okay,” he rasps, his stubble grazing Mark’s skin slowly back and forth, drawing another shudder out of him. He rocks the very tip of his finger, pressing in, drawing out, the smallest amount of pressure possible, and it’s going to drive Mark up the fucking wall in a second.

He pushes his hips back shakily, willing Roger to take the fucking hint.

“If you don’t put that in me right now,” Mark bites out, knocking his forehead against the wall again. It’s not like he’s never done this before – though, it’s been a few years since anyone else has put anything up his ass – but he can’t seem to stop clenching down, getting ahead of himself. It’s making it hard for Roger to get anywhere even if he was trying to. “I’m going to scream.”

“Mmmmmmm,” Roger hums, amused. He presses a little harder, and Mark feels the ring of muscle give just enough that his finger pops through. He whines and turns his head into his shoulder, biting down blindly on anything, anything that will muffle the noises he can already feel building up in his chest. “Well, if that’s what you wanna do, who am I to stop you?”

Mark realizes that he’s shaking, but he can’t seem to stop. “I- I n- I need, I-” he begins, voice trembling in time with the rest of him. Roger already has a second finger in him and he’s thrusting them up so fucking slow, curving them and dragging them back out like hooks to catch on the rim and _pull,_ just barely, just enough that Mark chokes on every other breath. Another part of him to add to the list of “things I didn’t know were sensitive”. There’s a notebook on top of the dresser wedged beneath the hand that’s barely holding him up, wires digging into the flesh of his palm, and Mark wonders wildly if it’s the one with his new screenplay idea, which recently has become 90% based on his own life, wonders if this is the next thing he’ll write in it, like it’s his fucking journal or something.

 _Dear diary,_ he imagines himself writing. _Roger fucked me against the dresser and it broke. Now there’s come all over my clean clothes, and I have to ask Mimi for quarters because I’m out._

_It was worth it. -Mark_

Carefully, trying his hardest not to fall on his face, Mark balances on one of his arms and reaches down his front to squeeze his weeping cock. He half-expects Roger to stop him, but instead, Roger crowds him up closer against the dresser, until he’s barely got space to move his hand anyway, and jabs his fingers up until they’re buried to his knuckles. Mark gasps, hips jolting forward against his will.

“I was wrong,” Roger says, and now he’s starting to sound a little strained. Mark wonders if he’s throbbing too, wants to reach around and grab his hard cock and guide it up between his legs. His ass and thighs are ruined, completely smeared with drippy-warm lube now; Roger’s dick would slide through it so easy, rubbing against him, little circles against his hole before he fucked into him at last. Mark is so caught up in the fantasy his heart almost stops when he notices Roger is still talking. “I think I want to hear you. Can you do that for me?”

Incredulous, Mark tries to twist around. Roger shoves him hard again and he stops trying, feeling the heat crawl up his neck. How Roger can sound so fucking polite on top of sounding like pure sex is completely beyond him. “I c- I _can’t_.”

“Moan for me,” Roger murmurs thickly. He sounds wrecked. Mark desperately wants to see the look on his face, wants to know where his eyes are fixed, what’s making his mouth water like that. Is it his hole stretched open around his fingers as he slips the third one up and spreads them apart, spreads him open until it starts to burn.

“I don’t want them to hear,” Mark gasps. He’s stretched up on his tiptoes right now, simultaneously trying to lean away from the intimate pain and fully appreciate it. Roger’s cock would be bigger than this – it is bigger than this, he would know, can imagine the girth of it stretching his hole open instead of his lips, taking him apart, wonders what it would be like to be so fucking full of Roger’s cock he couldn’t even fucking move, impaled on it. He’d have to just brace himself, bend over, and _take it_.

“Yeah you do,” Roger accuses. And then suddenly he’s not stretching Mark anymore – his fingers come back together and Mark pants out a harsh breath of anticipation, tightening down just as Roger plunges them back into him with purpose.

And then he’s _fucking_ Mark with his fingers, all three twisting and curling and thrusting up, up, up into him until every breath he takes is edged with a whimper.

“You want them to hear,” Roger says silkily. Mark finds himself nodding, hardly understanding what he’s agreeing to; he knows, on some baser level, that Roger is _right,_ and as humiliating as it is to admit his cock is leaking between his frantically stroking fingers just thinking of what Maureen and Mimi and the rest of them might hear from the next room. What they might be speculating about, if they’re listening. They could be listening, for all he knows. He stutters on an exhale. “You want them to know how fucking good you take it for me.”

“Fuck, I want it,” Mark moans, caught up in the moment. He can barely find his breath, the words coming out all jumbled together. “I’ll take it, I’ll take it, please, Roger-”

The room is stifling now and the perverse wet sounds of Roger’s fingers squelching in and out of him are all he can hear, layered over his own pounding pulse. The fact that there’s still a party underway on the other side of this door should be more alarming than it is; all of Mark’s apprehension has begun to drain out of him, as if he doesn’t have enough room for it with Roger cramming half of his fingers into him and taking him apart.

Roger really appears to be warming up to the idea of Mark’s humiliation, because on the next hard thrust of his hand he growls, “You want them to look at you? Want to be seen with your pants around your ankles, begging for my cock?”

Mark is out of his fucking mind, can’t get his wrist to move fast enough to catch his poor leaking dick up with the pace of Roger’s fingers. “Yes, yes, yes –!”

“You’d tell them what a slut you are for me?” Roger breathes, and Mark’s rational brain is officially disconnected.

“Holy _fuck_ ,” Mark gasps. His eyes want to be wide, but they’re closed, possibly because the mental images have become imperative to this game, and Mark’s always had a vivid imagination. Behind his eyelids he sees Collins’ sly grin, Angel snorting with laughter behind her hand as they watch Roger debase him. Watch him give into it like the good little slut he is. It’s shockingly easy to think of himself that way, although it’s never occurred to him somehow before in his private fantasies; apparently it’s occurred in Roger’s, though, because he’s way too into this.

Roger groans low like he’s been holding it back for hours. Like maybe he’s been staring at Mark the whole night because he wants this just as bad, maybe more… He curves his fingers down savagely against the knot of nerves in Mark’s ass and digs his nails into his hip to keep him still, rubbing there over and over and over in tiny thrusts, tiny circles, so firm and painfully pleasurable that Mark hears himself start to hiccup between senseless pleas.

“Say it,” Roger demands, teeth bared against Mark’s shoulder blade now. Mark can hear the scrape of his thumb ring on the front of his jeans, can vividly imagine Roger’s hand rubbing urgently against the delicious bulge straining the denim there. He doesn’t understand how Roger is even wearing jeans, between the heat and the inescapable arousal. He doesn’t _want_ Roger to be wearing jeans, but to convey that he’d have to be at least semi-coherent, and he is decidedly not. “Tell me what a slut you are.”

“I’m yours,” Mark pants, struggling to push back and get just another centimeter of friction against his stretched hole. “Belong to you. Want your cock so deep in me.”

So deep, so fucking hard, Roger with both hands latched around his hips so hard he’s helpless to do anything but spread his legs wider and push back into the punishment. Roger pressing him hard against the back of the couch and bending him over, swiping the fat head of his cock across Mark’s hole until Mark breaks down and sobs for it… Roger pounding into him relentlessly, hips snapping so quick so hard it hurts a little and he doesn’t have time to catch his breath between the thrusts –

Mark might not be allowed to have certain things, but it hasn’t stopped him from thinking about them so constantly that he’s got a fucking script for it already in his head.

“Jesus fucking Christ, Mark, you’re killing me,” Roger snarls, and he sounds more distraught than he has any right to be.

The hand that’s been holding Mark’s hip in place goes suddenly missing, and in its place, Mark feels the graze of the thin material of Roger’s boxers stretched around his knuckles brushing up against the back of his thigh. He pushes back against it instinctively, choking out obscene little noises and bitten-off words, almost-pleas. “Please,” he tries again, and this time it comes out sounding so ragged that he hides his reddening face in his scrawny, spit-slick bicep. “Fuck, I’ll scream for you, I’ll make sure everyone h-hears me, need it – need you, need to – _Roger.”_

“Do it,” Roger says, almost-taunting, almost-begging. The thrusts of his fingers have gone shallow, uneven, and Mark can feel the burn of his eyes on his back, his exposed ass. It’s still stinging, probably red with Roger’s handprints. “Let everyone know who fucking owns you.”

“You do,” Mark pants without hesitation. It’s never, ever been a question for him. He bites hard on the inside of his cheek, feels his feet slipping and tries to right himself, but it’s hard when Roger’s fingers are fucking into him so hard that the dresser is starting to quake. “You do, you do, m’ _yours_.”

“I can do whatever I want with you.” Roger sounds as lost in the fantasy as Mark is. The world is narrowing down to pure sensation. Faint laughter from the living room. Roger’s dick bumping into his thigh on every third stroke, so close, so _fucking close_. A slow, wet stripe up his back along his spine. Mark jerks his hips back and _keens_ the next time Roger deliberately rubs his fingers against his prostate. “I could call them all in here and tell you to spread your cheeks apart so they could watch, and you would.”

“Yeah,” Mark pants, nodding frantically. He can feel his orgasm mounting, the tension in every push and stretch of his tendons, the way his thighs are shaking so hard that he’s shocked Roger isn’t trying to hold them still. “Fuck, yeah.”

Roger’s fingers pull free and Mark feels abruptly bereft, but not for long – the sharp sting of another smack across his ass almost brings him right over the edge. He slams his bracing hand against the wall and yells in frustration.

“No, nononoplease, please –” He thinks he might cry, and oh, that should be disturbing but instead it makes his balls ache.

Roger ignores him. He’s still jerking off right behind him, still pressed against the back of Mark’s legs, except now his filthy hand is cupping Mark’s ass almost lovingly once again. He squeezes just a hair too hard, drawing a string of desperate curses out of Mark’s raw throat. The threat is there, implicit – Mark silently begs for him to get it over with and just do it, just smack him again, bring him over the edge. He twists around to look at him, mouth open as if to speak, but it goes dry at the sight before him.

“I’m going to tie you up sometime,” Roger says, grunting and tipping his head back. He’s pulling his dick vigorously, balls lightly smacking up against Mark’s ass through his boxers on every upstroke, and when he opens his eyes again he stares down between them at the spot where his cock keeps brushing Mark’s ass like he’s thinking the exact same thing that Mark is. “On the couch. Right out in the open… Gonna invite everyone over and let them watch while I tell you what a whore you are until you come in your pants. Let them see how bad you gag for it.” Mark finds that he’s nodding again. He still doesn’t have enough room to keep pace with Roger’s hand, and now he feels so fucking empty he wants to scream, but it almost doesn’t matter because the entire day’s worth of pent-up come feels like it’s already building up, ready to burst, and all it’s going to take is the right combination of words spilling from Roger’s mouth in a heady torrent and he really _will_ be screaming.

“Helpless… You won’t be able to control yourself.” Roger’s breath hitches and then he _groans,_ low and drawn-out, and Mark feels him shudder to a stop behind him. That only makes him more frantic – he’s got to catch up, got to get Roger’s fingers back in him somehow. “I want everyone to know you’re fucking _mine._ ”

The bruises on Mark’s neck are enough of a testament to this already, throbbing at the mere mention, but he gives a groan of agreement anyway. “I’d beg for you,” Mark promises feverishly, voice cracking on the next word. “Right in front of, of everyone.” He’s almost there, just a little more, little more – his fist slides furiously up and down his shaft, knuckles rubbing raw against the front of the dresser, he just _doesn’t care._

“Good boy,” Roger chuckles, too loudly – Mark gets a sudden flash, a mental snapshot of Mimi sitting up off of the floor and squinting down the hall toward the noise. Imagines her, with Collins and Angel and Maureen in tow, getting up and following it to the source, jiggling the doorknob before throwing the door open and –

And then they’d see him there, right there on the other side of the door, biting his lip and pushing back as Roger works his fingers back into him and bends him over the dresser like a sex toy, like he was made to take Roger’s dick, and Roger would lean over him possessively and growl and pull the rim of him open to make room for his hot, glistening cock –

“Pretend that they’re here,” Roger whispers, closer to his ear than he should be, but Mark doesn’t question it – he’s too busy rocking back on Roger’s tiny thrusts to hear anything else now. He can’t help obeying, imagination sprinting off after the image on demand, like it knows that Roger calls the shots.

Mark shudders with a complicated combination of powerful lust and embarrassment so keen he feels tears spring to his eyes again. He sucks in deep gasping breaths and pushes his hips back one last time, only half-listening to Roger’s whispered encouragements, whispered debasement, and comes for approximately five years all over himself and everything he owns.

Curiously, as he comes back to his senses, the world resumes at it’s normal volume and he realizes that the party is, indeed, still going on without them down the hall. _I Wanna Sex You Up_ is blaring so loudly that Mark is shocked their neighbors haven’t come up to scream at them through the door – not that he would have noticed if they had, not that he’d been capable of _any_ rational thought for the past twenty minutes – and even the guttural noise that rips out of Roger’s throat when he comes into his own carefully closed fist can’t entirely distract him from Angel and Mimi’s screeching rendition of it.

Ignoring the absurd urge to ask Roger for permission, Mark twists around and bites his lip, staring at him blearily. Some part of him is aware that his glasses have been knocked askew and are all but dangling at the tip of his nose, but he’s sweaty and still wracked with shuddering reverberations of mostly-satisfied lust, and Roger is fucking beautiful when he’s just come. Mark can’t get enough of it.

 _I need to take post-coital pictures of him,_ he realizes, biting just slightly harder on his already swollen lip. Eyes roving up and down Roger’s leonine body. At the wet stain at the front of his boxers. _A whole fucking album of them._

Somehow, he manages not to voice this, nor dive for the closet where he’s pretty sure his old Polaroid camera is still stowed in some untouched box. Instead he gropes weakly for a tissue and wipes his fingers off clumsily.

He stills when Roger leans forward and presses the gentlest kiss to the base of his neck.

“Hey,” he says, gentle, and Mark suddenly realizes how gaping his need for tenderness is right now. He leans into Roger gratefully, nearly falling backwards before Roger gets his pants zipped and steps up close behind him again, wrapping his arms tight around him from behind. Back when Mark had first fantasized about him, he’d had somewhat of a muscle tone and had always smelled like a bar, hazy and indefinably sexual. Now, his arms are nearly as thin as Mark’s, he smells like sweat and vodka and distinctly like Mark.

A pleasant chasm yawns open in Mark’s chest, the fluttering realization blowing him right over the edge of the cliff and into it. Roger nuzzles into the side of his neck and peppers it with kisses, first in quick succession and then slow, sucking, sensual, and Mark feels more cherished than he can ever remember feeling in his life.

“Wanna go back out now?” Roger whispers. Mark nods, not trusting his voice. Feeling is beginning to return to his knees. His wrist aches fiercely.

He fucking loves it.

He had no idea.

“You know,” he says as they emerge into the hallway. Roger has reluctantly released him, is walking a respectable distance behind him, and Mark doesn’t yet have the courage to tell him that _fuck yes,_ he wants everyone to know. “You learn something new about yourself every day.”

Roger eyes him speculatively. “Yeah. You really do.”


End file.
